Reach: Winterbirth
by Marianne Bennet
Summary: Who would have thought that trying to save Reach could give a somewhat damaged, very chatty Six a chance to save herself? Six/Carter. Warning: will deviate from canon.
1. Omens

**Winterbirth**

_A Halo Reach Fan Fiction by Marianne Bennet_

Opening Author's Note:

This is my first Halo anything fan fic (exciting) so bear that in mind. I'm writing two thousand word snippets that will span the length of the game and its characters (tragic) stories. I'm trying to write one every few days but my life is pretty hectic so bear with me if I don't update on a regular basis, alright?

The Number Six in this story is my own creation. The other various characters belong in varying degrees to the Halo franchise.

Enjoy! Please review as constructive feedback is always welcome!

**One: Omens**

She could feel every bump in the road through the truck's worn seat. Through her armor too but the suit had felt like a second skin for as long as she cared to remember. Remembering or rather the wanting of kept memories was a new thing: something she didn't bother to prep herself for.

She hadn't needed to remember before. Survival is something she found to be instinctual, whether she was holding a stick or her favorite DMR, and she was a natural predator. She told herself that she remembered impulses, not emotions, that her Spartan armor could protect her from most things but not the internal elements of heartbreak and loss. People died in her field of work; whether enemies or allies, she didn't want to memorize their faces and she wouldn't wish the same on anyone else. Better to go nameless, faceless. Numbers were safer and if people saw her as a shell, then so what?

It was a new day and a new number, as she was constantly reminded by the helmet in her hands with its new paintjob: **B312**. She had insisted on doing it herself. It was a process for her; so what if the lettering toward the right was slightly bigger than that on the left? She was never one for superficial first impressions; she let her gun do the talking.

It wasn't as though she didn't remember anything about her past life. It was more as though her past was a movie that she watched with only slight interest that rolled on behind her like the landscape around her. She could recall names, dates, places, but they were all like they belonged to someone else. They didn't matter much to her anyway.

"We're coming up on Noble Team's base of operations," the driver called to her over the white noise of the wheels. "It's just over that ridge there."

"You call that a ridge?"

He considered. "Nah, more like a bump. But you can't see it yet. You want to put your helmet on? The dust gets in your eyes, doesn't it?"

"Not enough to make me want to put it on." She liked the open spaces.

"Suit yourself."

"Noble Team's got a base? I thought they were on the move." She knew they were on the move; she did her homework before she let herself get signed onto anything.

"Sure they are. They go wherever they're needed."

"On Reach?"

"Yep. You born here?"

"No." She paused. "Harmony. What do you know about Noble Team?"

"Not much to be honest. They're all very hush-hush. But I guess you'll find out." They'd crossed over the "ridge." "There."

The base looked like a box with two Falcons perched beside it. She put on her helmet, feeling the familiar coolness well around her face and its weight settle down upon her shoulders. "What do you know about Noble One?"

"Not much."

"What have you _heard _about him?"

"Hey, don't look at me; I'm just the delivery boy."

"And I'm the package," she observed with a mixture of bitterness and satisfaction.

"Why do you want to know about him anyway?"

"I like to know something about who's gonna be sending me out under enemy fire."

"Reach isn't that bad. You know: farmers and ONI hush-hush."

"All the same," she shrugged. "Did you hear happened to their last Number Six?"

"No but I'm guessing that you did."

"Threw himself down on a suicide bomber. Locked his armor. Saved the rest of his team."

"Ah."

"I like to know what I'm getting into."

"They got an, ah, history of self-sacrifice?" They came to a halt between the Falcons.

She pushed herself out of the truck and grabbed her DMR and grenades. She raised her eyebrows even though she knew the driver couldn't see. "You tell me," she said breezily and she crossed over towards the compound.

Well aware that someone was watching her from the interior of the Falcon –she saw his sniper rifle and already her fingers itched to get their hands on it, just for a test run or longer if she could get away with it –she shrugged her rifle onto her back and continued on, never stepping out of stride. Keep moving.

"…the Office of Naval Intelligence believes the deployment of a Spartan team to be a misallocation of valuable resources. I disagree."

She could feel the judgment coming on as she entered the tin box of an outpost. Two pairs of eyes –one obscured by his helmet, the other barefaced –rose to her approach and she could feel them studying her every movement, or so she suspected. Call her paranoid but this team sounded something like a family and here she was the cuckoo bird. Her suspicions were confirmed as another Spartan –this one another woman and without her helmet–crossed in front of her, cutting off her path towards the monitors and whom she suspected to be Noble Leader.

"Commander," said the woman and the Spartan at the monitor turned to look at her.

"So that's our new Number Six," observed the man with the large gun at his side and she unconsciously tried to stand a little taller.

"And you're my new team," she said in return, glancing at each of them, scrutinizing them boldly: an advantage to the helmet's presence.

"Kat," said the Spartan with a splattered skull smeared across his visor, "you read her file?"

Kat –the woman in turquoise armor –shrugged. "Only the parts that weren't covered in black ink."

She thought she saw the man that had first spoke cover a smile in the corner of her vision. Looking to the Spartan at the monitor –"Commander," Kat had called him –she saw that he had turned back to his conversation.

"Anyone claim responsibility, sir?" he asked, laying a hand upon the helmet perched upon the desk.

"ONI thinks it might be the local insurrection," was his answer. "Five months ago, they pulled a similar job on Harmony…"

"You came from Harmony, didn't you?" she was asked by the big man. "I'm Jorge by the way. That's Kat, Emile, and Jun's out by the Falcon."

"I saw him when I came in."

"Don't miss much, do you?"

"Trained for it, sir."

"It's Jorge, actually. Carter's the 'sir' around here."

"That's the one that's too busy to acknowledge your presence is Carter," said Emile in a low, slightly mocking tone.

She glanced to Carter: Noble Leader didn't bat an eyelash though he must have heard them. "He's busy," she allowed.

"If you saw Jun, that means he saw you too. He's our snip."

"I noticed."

"Any chance he, uh, saw you without the helmet?"

"Doubtful." Still, she fought down an unwelcome smile.

"And what do we call you?" Jorge leaned forward.

"Six," she replied with a little quirk of the lips she knew they could not see. "Isn't that what we're supposed to call each other when we're on duty?"

Kat and Jorge exchanged a look; she did not miss Kat's smirk.

"…Sir, consider it done," they heard Carter say and all fell quiet.

"Then I'll see you on the other side. Holland out."

"I take it you're Jennifer," Carter turned to her and held out a hand before she could blink, or so it felt like.

She flinched. He hesitated. "Would you rather I call you something else?" She could hear Emile's snort and Jorge's chuckle. Her face flamed red. "Do you go by Jen? Jenny?" She saw Kat smirk again.

Turning away from his easy smile, she replied with a lie, "Not since I entered the service. Its Six now and I hope it will be that way for a while."

He didn't falter; perhaps he had encountered equally enigmatic soldiers in his past. "Six then. I hope so too. I'm Carter, Noble-One, Jun –that's Noble 4 –is outside, that's Kat, Emile, Jorge, Two, Three, and Five respectively. Those last two are the ones that probably damaged my reputation by you beyond repair."

"We're setting you up to look good for the newbie," replied Emile, slightly snarky.

"We need to get moving, commander," said Kat, shooting Emile a look.

She led the rest of the team filed out of the room in quick procession; Jorge dropped Six a quick wink before Carter shifted his weight, obscuring the exit from her view. "I've gotta be honest with you, Six: Thom was an integral part of this team. He was a good soldier and a good man and sometimes those things don't go hand in hand like you'd think they might. I'm not gonna pretend that things aren't going to be pretty rough for you these first couple of weeks but an attitude isn't going to help anybody. You understand?"

"Sir," she said, pushing down any feelings of resentment that might have come bubbling up to the surface.

"So, you came from Harmony?"

"Yes, sir. I was with a Special Ops group there. We were the ones that took down the rebels there."

"You don't need to impress me twice, lieutenant; I already read your file."

She cursed under her breath. "Any of you haven't?"

"Emile's not big on reading and I don't think Jorge bothered but that's about it," he sat himself down in the Falcon. Jorge slid in beside him and shot Carter a look of good natured annoyance before sliding his helmet over his head.

Six rested her palms upon her knees. "Is this a psychological check-up then? Sir."

"Don't feel the pressure or anything."

"I'm feeling it," said Jorge easily. "You got a past you'd like to tell us about, Spartan, or is it all in numbers?" She said nothing in return. "Don't like to talk about it?"

"Do you?"

Emile's voice came over the comm. as the Falcons began to take off, one after the other. "Don't ask Jorge to start talking now, newbie. Trust me: he won't stop."

She chuckled despite herself, unwillingly falling into what seemed an open and easy camaraderie despite Carter's warnings. She looked to the commander. "You figured out that I've got all my marbles yet?"

"I think I hear some rolling in your head coming over the comm.," he replied. Did anything phase him? "There was one thing about your file."

"You get through all the censors?"

"Yes, in fact." She whistled in slow appreciation. "I saw everything, even the parts they didn't want me to. I'm glad to have someone with your skill set and I'm happy enough to have Noble Team back up to full strength." There seemed a heavy silence over the comm. "But that lone wolf stuff has got to stay behind. We're a team. You understand?"

"Got it." She'd have met his eyes if she could. "Looks like someone's done his homework."

"I take it you did too."

"I'm feeling the tension," voiced Emile dryly.

"No tension here, Emile," said Carter. He looked to Six. "You, lieutenant?"

"Negative, sir."

"Then we've got no problems." Carter settled back into his seat.

Six pursed her lips and kept quiet. No point in making enemies, not now. Noble One seemed as though he would like to make friends; that wasn't going to happen on her watch. She told herself that she was here to tread the fine line traced around friendship, to get them to care about her enough to keep her alive but nothing further. Caring was an easy trap but she trusted her abilities to toe the line.

Jorge appeared lost in thought, his helmet's visor turned toward the ever moving landscape. She wondered if he was remembering the previous Six. Had he rode with Carter and Jorge? Had he occupied this very seat? Was she trying to fill a hole that she could only fall into and be lost in? Well, there was no point in remembering someone she had never known. Better make the rare moment of memory count for somebody important.


	2. Hit the Ground

**Winterbirth**

_A Halo Reach Fan Fiction by Marianne Bennet_

A/N: Alright, maybe I'm being a bit more regular than I had predicted. But I haven't got much to do right now and, though I'm working on a longer Mass Effect piece (_The Three Day Storm, _check it out) these little things are a wonderful distraction. So here we go.

**Two: Hit the Ground**

Her feet, encased, touched down on the ground, flattening two perfectly identical crops of grass. Across the way, Emile and Kat did the same. She paused for a moment, stopped steady in her tracks, eyes quickly scanning the skies and the ridge of the valley. A fleeting impulse to stop and inhale the crispness of wet grass and the cool after effects of rain hit her hard and she had to take a moment to brush the thought aside.

Carter, clad in blue armor, dropped down beside her. Out of the corner of her visor, she saw the commander send a quick salute to Jun in the already airborne Falcon that had landed across the way and then he moved forward into the underbrush. Kat followed close in his shadow or so Six observed. The Spartan already assumed it would only be natural for a younger team member to take initiative from her commander but this was something different. For what would not be the last time, Six wondered if there was more in the dynamics of Noble Leader's relationship with his team than she had previously surmised.

"See anything, Jun?" she heard him say over the comm.

"_Negative, commander. A few settlements besides the one closest to your current position but I don't see anyone outside._"

"Could they be out working the fields?" Jorge suggested.

"We're in the fields now."

"_Not as far as I can see from this position_," responded Jun, ignoring Emile's interjection. "_There may be more farms deeper into the valley, if you would like me to take a look_."

"Negative, Four. Maintain current recon sweep. The rest of you, move forward. Emile, take point. Six, cover his flank."

Emile quickly moved into a sprint and Six followed suit with equal speed. As he scaled a large boulder in their path, she crouched down and, leaning against the huge rock, peered around its edge. "Settlement looks deserted," said Emile, presumably gazing through his scope. "Either that or they've bunkered down deep. There's a truck on fire. Might've been sabotage."

"And the distress signal is coming from there?"

"Correct, commander." Six turned slightly to see that Noble's other female Spartan had moved closer to the buildings. "But I'm not reading anything on my radar."

"Alright, team: move into the courtyard."

Emile leapt off of the boulder and hit the ground running but Six had taken off at a sprint moments before and was a good fifty feet ahead when Carter's voice rang in her ear: "Fall back, Six. That's an order, soldier."

Unwillingly and with a noise of dissent, she complied. "Keeping a tight leash on me, commander?"

"I'd like to be sure of you before you start running out on your own," was his dry response.

Her gloved hand's grip on her Magnum tightened. Jorge, coming up behind her, noticed. There was a soft click over her comm. as he opened up a local channel and advised, "Easy there, Spartan. Think of this as your test run."

_And Teacher doesn't want me running out of his league,_ she thought before nodding to the older soldier and dropping after Kat into the courtyard.

The truck was smoldering now, sending soft pinnacles of smoke up into the darkening sky, one shade of gray against another. Emile –another gray shape in the foreground –leaned down to swipe something –a small device emitting a red glow in measured bursts of light –from the cracked and pockmarked tiles. "Found it."

He carelessly tossed the blinking beacon to Kat. She caught it and Carter asked, "Make out any ID?"

Six kept her eyes and gun trained on the open valley as Kat answered, "Negative, commander, but it's military alright."

"So where are the troopers?" inquired Jorge.

She cast a glance back at the rest of the team before turning around to voice her opinion. "There's blood –a lot of it –but I don't think anyone died here. If they did, somebody was careful to clean up." She bit her lip but her voice did nothing to betray her unease. "And I think the lack of explosives residue is worth noting."

"Jun?" Carter reflexively looked to the sky for confirmation and Six felt another twinge of irritation.

"_She's right, commander._"

Emile casually holstered his shotgun. "Well," he drew the word out, "it could always be… plasma. You know."

"I wouldn't put any money on that," said Jorge with disgust –at his comrade or at the mere mention of the Covenant, Six didn't know. "Not here. Not on Reach."

"Alright, nothing else to see here," said Carter decisively. "Let's move on. And double time it, team. Those troopers can't be far off."

_If they're alive,_ whispered a voice in Six's mind. She resisted the urge to shudder. Spartans didn't do that. Besides, they were all thinking it; why should Six be fazed by anything they were not? If anything, she was fazed by less. Soldiers die. Spartans die. She knew enough of death to have figured that out a long time ago.

"Permission to engage?" said Emile as they ran forward and past a bolted gate.

"Permission granted. But be selective."

"Commander, house is locked up tight."

"Move around to the side. Onto the terrace, Six, and then into the house. I'm right behind you."

"Yes, sir." She obeyed, grateful despite herself for the opportunity. If he was looking for proof of her abilities –if any of them were –by God, she would give them it if it were the last thing she'd do.

It took her a moment to realize that she really meant that.

She and Carter moved through darkened corridors, soundless save for their steps against the wooden floors. "It looks like they all just got up and left," she observed.

Carter smashed the padlock on one of the doors and Jorge entered, followed by the others. "No signs of force," the bigger man murmured.

"Unless you count the truck on fire," said Emile flatly.

"Let's focus here, team," interjected Carter, a note of warning in his tone.

Jorge and Emile followed their commander into the next room but Six paused at the window overlooking the wind turbines and scanned the skies. She didn't expect the rebels to be airborne but if they weren't rebels at all…

"You alright there, lieutenant?"

Kat's voice took her by surprise. She turned and said, "Fine." Reluctantly and somewhat unintentionally, her gaze dropped down to Kat's robotic arm and the pistol it held. She swallowed. "I was just thinking… if it was Covenant…"

"It's not Covenant," Jorge's voice came over the comm.

Kat jerked her head in the direction of the door. "Leave it be, Six. We'll find out soon enough."

She nodded abruptly and made for the courtyard. Kat had followed her out of the house when they heard, "Out of the house, now!"

Emile had his shotgun pointed at an older man dressed in civilian attire shuffling out of a door and into the rain. Jorge made a noise of exasperation and shoved his way past Kat and Six. "Put your gun down. They're not rebels. They're farmers. Look at them."

Carter nodded to Emile and the Spartan pointed his weapon down at the ground. To Jorge, he said, "Ask them what they're doing here."

The man –Six didn't bother getting a good look at him –said something in some language that Six hadn't bothered learning and then Jorge said, "Hiding, sir. He says that the neighbors were attacked last night…"

_Something falling woke her up. She opened her eyes to see the fire licking at her bed sheets._

"That there was screaming, gunfire…"

_She got up. The floor was hot against her bare feet. She looked out of the window. Grenades flew through the sky like blue Christmas ornaments._

"Until about sunrise. Something in the fields… killed his son."

"What does he mean 'something'?"

A click broke her out of it. Jun's voice came over the comm.: "Be advised, commander: I'm reading heat sigs in the structure directly ahead of you."

Carter turned with mechanical efficiency in the direction of the mentioned structure. "Five, get them back in the house." Jorge was shouting something and the civilians obeyed. "Noble Team, let's move."

Six felt her legs start moving until she was in full sprint alongside Emile and Kat. Jorge brought up the rear on account of his gun but their ranks evened out anyway as they approached the open room on the side of the building.

"Damn it." Jorge was the first to speak.

"Commander? Fill me in."

He took two steps into the building. Carter's voice was heavy. "We've got military casualties here, Jun. Two."

"Looks like they were interrogated," Six found her voice again.

"It's messy," Carter continued.

"Bastards," said Emile under his breath. "Whoever they are."

Carter got to his feet. "Into the house. Maybe we'll be able to figure that out if we move fast."

Six stepped into line behind Jorge, bringing up the rear of the small party as they filed through the rooms. The team was quiet, their earlier banter subdued by what they had seen. Even Emile appeared restrained.

She paused in a hallway and gazed out of the large window for a moment. The rain was falling heavier now and it was difficult to make out the valley beyond the settlement. There was a waterfall cascading down the cliff; that she could make out, its shape just beyond the edge of the semi-circle roof of the structure. And then she saw something.

"Contact!" she yelled just before pulling out her .66 pistol and shooting twice, once to break the glass, another to fire at the enemy perched upon the edge of the roof.

Jorge's head snapped back to look at her in shock and then Emile came down back into the corridor. "Skirmisher!" he confirmed at a shout and then took off down the stairs at the end of the hallway.

"What?" she heard Carter say and then Jorge spat out, "It's the damn Covenant," in response. She heard Carter swear and then Jorge went running down the stairs after Emile. Six kept her eyes trained on the courtyard, reloading her Magnum as a train of Grunts emerged from behind a wall of crates, moving in single file. Six shots and they were down on the ground, blood pooling against the grass and tiles like honey.

She reloaded again and barely had time to duck before a bolt flew over her helmet. There was another shot and then Carter was down beside her, reloading his DMR. "Go, Six," he jerked his head down the empty corridor.

Nodding once, she swapped her pistol for a rifle and stormed down the stairs. She could almost hear her brain click into autopilot amid the regimented shots of Jorge's machine gun. She paused by the doorway –it seemed as though the contacts had been neutralized –when an orange armored figure launched forward at her from a side entrance to the building. She struggled for a moment, fists and feet punching and kicking at the typical pressure points for a human enemy when the attacker let loose a strangled cry and blood ran down Six's visor.

Carter kicked the alien assailant aside, thrust his knife back into its casing, and held out a hand to her. She took it, grateful, and he pulled her up to her feet. "Elite," he said by way of explanation, and then turned to the rest of his team. "Everyone alright?"

"It's the fracking Covenant!" snapped Jorge. "On Reach. How the hell did they get here?"

"I know, Five. But there isn't time to ask questions. Let's get to that relay outpost."

"Commander," Jun's voice crackled over the comm., "I'm reading Covenant drop ships inbound on your position."

"So now they rear their ugly heads."

"Calm down, Five. Are they zeroing in on this structure, Jun?"

"Negative. I don't think there's enough room for them to drop in the courtyard. They're heading for the open space across the river."

"Right in our path," Emile observed wryly.

"Thanks for the head's up, Jun. Team, head for the river."

The river only came up to her waist but she took the time to splash the water against her helmet, washing away the Elite's blood where the rain had not. The water churned around her body and around Jorge and his gun as he lugged it through the river. When she was across, Six ducked behind a cluster of rocks and used her scope to zero in on the enemy: grunts, skirmishers, and several of those that Carter had named Elites. She gritted her teeth, pushed off from the rock, and matched her pace with Kat's as the team dove into battle.

She took out a skirmisher with a well-aimed headshot but cursed with frustration when her next shot only ricocheted off of one of the Elite's shields. Beside her, Jorge opened fire on a clump of grunts and the smaller assailants scattered like marbles, waving their hands in the air, easy pickings for Carter's DMR. Kat drew an Elite's attention left, leaving its flank open for Emile's favorite knife. Noble Team worked like a well oiled machine and, while Six was unsure of where she fit in among the cogs, she was sure she'd be able to do some damage of her own.

Her hands clawed against stone as she swiftly scaled an outcropping of boulders in the center of the battlefield. Taking initiative as one of the Elites ducked for cover, she leapt onto its back and, knife in hand, and, as she had hoped, was able to rip open its jugular with the blade.

It was messy. Six thrust the corpse forward and away from her, hardly noticing as it crushed a fleeing grunt. The rain made short work of the blood on her gloves as it had before but she wiped her blade on the grass once the battlefield was clear.

"Stand down, team, stand down," said Carter and they regrouped at the edge of the field. "Contacts neutralized."

"Contacts, Carter? It's the damn Covenant!"

Emile snorted. "Cheer up, big man: this whole valley turned into a free-fire zone."

Carter ignored them and looked to Kat. "We need to warn Holland. I need you at the relay outpost now, Kat."

"Commander? I'm reading more hostile activity to the northeast."

"Got it, Jun. Emile, you're with Kat. Five, Six, we'll run interference ground-side and meet up at the outpost."

Kat nodded, turned away, and said into her comm., "Noble Three, requesting airlift."

"Five, Six, the truck."

She hadn't thought that anyone noticed her quiet kill in the chaos of the battle until Jorge clapped her on the back as she passed him on her way to the driver's seat and said, "Nice one."

Emile shrugged as he headed toward Kat and the pick-up zone. "Not bad for a newbie."

"I'm not a newbie," Six protested but was quieted when she caught Carter's eye and he rewarded her with a small, approving nod as he hoisted himself into the passenger seat of the vehicle. Jorge clambered onto the back with his gun and then Six put her foot to the gas and they were moving forward.


	3. First Contention

**Winterbirth**

_A Halo Reach Fan Fiction by Marianne Bennet_

**A/N**: Okay, so I'm back on the map and back in the online world. Which is great because I got the chance to really decide that I want to focus on this fic and had a chance to do my own homework regarding the timeline and planning out the chapters (plan for 25 of 'em, including an epilogue).

I want to take this moment of your time to thank all of my wonderful reviewers (you make my heart –and ego –swell) and a big thank you to my most wonderful, most lovely beta-reader, **EternalEntity**. This one's for you.

**Three: Contention**

_July 24__th__, 2552 _

Carter seemed to be pumping the Elite full of bullets but the alien assailant was quick to leap and dodge, dancing about the muzzle of the truck until Noble Team's commander was forced by necessity to reload. Six jammed the vehicle into reverse to no avail; their attacker continued to keep out of range of Jorge's gun. She ground her teeth together in frustration at the Elite's refusal to "just fracking die already" –as she put it so eloquently –but it was when the damn thing decided to attempt to commandeer the truck that Six really decided that she'd had enough. She jerked the wheel right; knocking the Elite to the ground before slamming her foot to the gas, crushing the attacker's legs against the wet grass as they pulled forward.

The creature moaned out in pain and Carter swiveled in his seat to put it out of its misery. As they left the corpse behind, Jorge swore very colorfully and snarled in Carter's general direction, "How many bloody outposts have they taken over out here?"

"Five, I'm not going to say this again: You need to calm down."

"But how much have they taken? A few settlements? A relay outpost? What next? How much ground have they got on us?"

"Your guess is as good as mine."

"That's not an answer, commander."

"Well then maybe you'll get a chance to ask them yourself. Keep going forward, Six. We're getting closer."

"Yes, sir." Privately, she suspected that Jorge wouldn't let a single Grunt live long enough to tell the tale to anybody and she'd be right there with him pumping out bullets to match the rate of her accelerated heartbeat. She kept her eyes on the road but then something to the left of the beaten path caught her attention, a rustling in a clump of bushes too muted in nature to be normal. "Commander: something at eleven o'clock. In the brush just up ahead."

"Could be friendlies," Jorge suggested but moved his gun to zero in on the spot she had indicated. "Caught in the field, couldn't make it back."

Perhaps considering that option, Carter raised his DMR into the air and fired a single shot. Six's foot lingered over the gas pedal, letting the engine stall as the crackling grew louder. Suddenly, there was a crashing noise and three large birds ran out from the foliage, long extended necks swaying like stems in a breeze, in apparent panic. They burst forth and ran freely about the vehicle and away into the rainy valley.

Momentarily disgusted, Jorge loosened his grip on his gun. "Moa," he snorted. "And here I was hoping for something more interesting."

Carter could not completely suppress a heavy sigh. "Alright, Six. Let's double time it now."

She could not bring herself to tear her gaze from the cluster of bushes. "I swear… I saw something."

"We need to keep up the interference," he reminded her.

Tightening both her lips and her grip on the wheel, she shrugged in what she hoped was an amicable manner –_stuck-up idiot I've got for a commander after all_ –and complied with the removal of her other foot from the brakes. They pulled forward through the clearing and had gone about a dozen yards when the skirmisher leapt out from behind and latched onto Jorge's back.

There was no time to waste in revealing or even acknowledging her immediate shock and frustration –frustration with Carter for making them move on, frustration with herself for not insisting on firing into the bush anyway. The skirmisher was clinging onto Jorge's back like a monkey, attempting to pry the big man away from the mounted gun, and that was the issue at hand.

In a flash of movement, Carter jammed fresh ammo into his gun, simultaneously twisting around in his seat. "Veer left, Six," he said loud and clear but calm, as calmly as though he were calling to her over the chatter of the rec room. "Left!"

The truck swerved to the left as per command and the weight of the gun jerked in that direction as well. Jorge and his assailant swung toward the right and the older Spartan, predicting his commander's intention, did his best to maneuver his bulky frame into a crouch. Carter aimed his shots for the enemy's head and neck.

The skirmisher howled as the bullets penetrated its armor, cutting clear into the flesh, and let go of Jorge's neck to fall clear to the ground. Six set the gears to reverse and all three team members listened to the sickening crunch with grim satisfaction.

Noble's commander sucked in air between his teeth and nodded to Six, a motion more akin to begrudging gratitude than pure resentment. "Alright," he said. "Now we double time it."

A click came over the comm. Jun's voice was filled with static. "_Is everything alright over there, commander?_"

"It is now." Carter motioned for Six to increase their speed. He didn't even look at her. "Any update from Emile and Kat?"

"_Nothing since their drop-off. Though I'm picking up a signal now…_"

"Patch it through."

"_Mayday! Three-Charlie-Six, we're under attack by Covenant forces. The Covenant is on Reach. I repeat: the Covenant is on reach! Somebody read me out there?_"

Six briefly took her eyes off of the road to glance at her commander. "Must be the missing troopers," said Jorge.

"Let's move, Six. We need to find the source of that distress call."

"_All due respect, commander, but search-and-rescue –rounding up strays per say –isn't necessarily our top priority here._"

"We came here in the first place to do just that. And we don't leave people behind. Let me know if you–"

"_I've got visual of possible friendly forces under attack just south of your position._" Six could practically see Jun's smug smile over the comm. "_I take it that was what you were asking for._"

"_We're under attack. Mayday! Mayday! I've got wounded here, can't hold out much longer. God, I hope somebody's hearing this._"

"We go south then," said Six slightly under her breath and turned the truck left. "Detour. Great."

Carter didn't sound like he was smiling. "Keep going, soldier."

…

Patches of grass were burning to the left of the empty settlement, stepping stones into a war zone of fallen UNSC troopers, downed Covenant soldiers, and grenades, both inactive and live, lying upon the ground and flying through the air. Six parked the truck right in the middle of it, a makeshift barricade, and she, Jorge, and Carter leapt forward to take the heat off of the wounded and weary holdouts.

"Noble Three, we've located the trooper squad," said Carter in between rapid shots taken at a clump of Jackals. "Request immediate evac. Send my coordinates."

"_Solid copy, commander. I'm recalling Falcon Charlie 2 now. Just hold evac position._"

"Easier said than done," commented Jorge wryly. "Come on, Six. How about you and me take that Covenant scum over there?"

She grinned in response: a feral expression she knew no one could see. "Let's take 'em down, Five."

Trading her Magnum for a fallen corporal's DMR, she took aim and fired. The shot ricocheted off of an Elite's silvery armor but it was enough to draw him into Jorge's path. The big man hit the foreign fighter with just the right amount of firepower to take down its shields. The Elite roared in response to the crippling blow, rushing the Spartan in three huge strides, but was stopped dead in its path by Six's well-aimed headshot.

She looked up for new direction from the older Spartan but Jorge had already moved on to exterminate a crowd of unlucky Grunts. Looking to Carter, she saw that Noble Leader had dispatched a couple of Jackals and was working down another Elite's shields. Seeing no other assailants in the field, she watched his battle rather engage the alien herself, admiring,despite herself, the way he didn't seem to relinquish his position and yet managed to dodge all of his foe's shots. If it had been her, she would have moved into cover by now, inching along the perimeter of some rock to sneak up on her enemy from behind. Noble's leader fought much more… well, _nobly_ than she did and though she would like to label him a ham-fisted fool with no eye for subterfuge, she couldn't. That didn't mean that she had to admit that out loud to anybody else though.

Someone moved into her line of sight, obstructing the view of Carter's kill: a weary-faced man with hard brown eyes and the left side of his face sliced open. "Spartans?" he said out loud.

"Get some first aid on that," she advised without preamble.

"_Noble Leader, be advised: I have visual on inbound Covenant drop ships._"

Carter pushed forward past Six, saying into his comm., "Evac ships, keep your distance." Over his shoulder, he said, "Five, Six, keep LZ green when those drop ships come in."

"Corporal Travis, sir," said the previously unidentified soldier, grateful for Carter's entrance, "with 3 Charlie. Sir, it's the Covenant."

Jorge appeared on Six's left and gestured for her to look to the horizon. As the ships swooped down into the clearing, she watched as Carter put a hand on Travis's shoulder and said, "We know, corporal. Get the wounded and survivors together. It's time to get you out of here."

The drop ships were looming closer and it appeared that they meant to linger. Six's suspicions were confirmed as the first blue-white blasts were fired and the truck they had arrived in was obliterated into a fiery wreck. She stared at the smoldering remains, captivated by the flames and the memories they conjured up, for a few moments, moments she didn't have, and Carter shoved her down as the second round of flares began.

"Are you crazy, just standing around like that?" he demanded, shoving ammo into her hand. "Get to work, Spartan."

"You don't have to look out for me," she shot back but the argument sounded weak even to her own ears. _I'm here; I'm not there; I'm here_.

The look he might have shot her through the helmet would have been deadly for all that his tone was scathing. "I'm not gonna be the cause of another lost Number Six –not when we can't afford it happening again and not when I can do something about it."

"From what I heard, he brought that on himself," she could not resist saying even as she took out a quick succession of Grunts with her assault rifle. "I don't plan to."

"Oh, don't you?" said Carter, dispatching a Jackal. "Might I ask what that was then, besides being cannon fodder?"

"No, I–"

"Easy there," said Jorge, kicking an Elite's corpse to the wayside. "I think that's it."

"Transport, LZ is clear," said Carter after a quick evaluation of the area. "Move in for evac."

"_Affirmative. Transport inbound._"

"Corporal, get your men together. We'll move you out of the hot zone for recuperation."

"Thank you, sir," said Travis, stepping forward and leading what remained of his troop. Six glanced skyward as twin Falcons landed among the rubble. Directing the wounded survivors to the leftmost vehicle, she heard the corporal say, "We lost a lot of men. I thought we were next, especially given that I didn't expect to see a team of Spartans out here… you are a team, aren't you?"

"And what made you think otherwise, corporal?" said Jorge with a chuckle, cheerfulness evident in his tone as he glanced between Carter and Six.

Carter was less amused. "We are. And I'm sorry for the loss of members of your troop but we need to get moving. We'll do our best to give your fallen a proper service later."

Jorge and Six moved to their Falcon, sat down, and awaited Carter. As he joined them, Six asked, "Do you really think anyone's gonna be able to come back and collect corpses?"

"What do you think, Six?" His voice was much heavier than it had been before and she, properly but unwillingly ashamed, glanced at her knees.

"Well, I say we better be able to," said Jorge stoutly as the Falcon lifted into the air. "I want these bastards off Reach and the sooner, the better."

"Hear, hear," replied Carter grimly as he reached back and banged on the wall for the pilot to go faster.


	4. Down the Rabbit Hole

**Winterbirth**

_A Halo Reach Fan Fiction by Marianne Bennet_

**A/N**: Nothing much to say this time around. Thank you to my reviewers and to my beta-reader EternalEntity. Enjoy!

**Four: Down the Rabbit Hole**

_July 24__th__, 2552 _

Much of the fog that filled the air around the relay outpost was revealed to be smoke as the Falcon descended back into the valley. Some of it managed to get through the ventilators of Six's helmet and she unwittingly breathed in the bitter vapor as Carter said into his comm.: "Noble Two, sit-rep. How are we doing over there?"

"_We're at the relay outpost, commander._"

"_Beautiful scenery,_" Emile's voice came over the speaker in Six's helmet in tones of sarcasm. "_And the wildlife is something else. Wish you were here, commander._"

"_Door's locked,_" Kat continued."_Mechanism's been flash-fused._"

"Well, you can beat it, right?"

"_I've dialed up my torch and cut a way through but it's going to take some time._"

"Alright, we're heading to your location. Won't be too long now."

"What's our objective, sir?"

"Clear the field," Carter said in response to Jorge's query. "Get inside; get word to Holland as quickly as possible. Round up survivors, get them out of there. You know the drill." The courtyard of the outpost came into view through the fog. "Drop us off there," he told the pilot.

The man winced. "LZ's a little hot, sir."

"We know. Put her down, pilot." He glanced up and at Six. "I hope you've had your fill of sitting around, Six, because break time's over."

She rolled her eyes, waves of contention rolling off of her. "Understood, sir," she replied through clenched teeth.

"Emile, I want you to fall back and stick on Kat. Make sure nobody gets near her."

"_Sure thing, commander. See you soon._"

"Jorge, cover us. Six and I will clear a path to the door."

"Will do," he replied as the Falcon dropped down into the heat of the battle in the courtyard. "Let's go make a ruckus."

Six leapt forward past Carter and immediately zeroed in on where Kat was crouched by the panel to the right of the huge door. Emile was down beside her and had cleared the area between the Covenant forces and their position as per Carter's instruction but there was a large arc of enemies still left to breach.

She moved fluidly through the area, pausing only to snap an unlucky Jackal's neck between her arm and torso. She let it drop dead to the ground and dispatched its blue shielded counterpart with an equally graceful thrust of her knife. She jerked her wrist back, retrieving the blade and thinking idly that if Halsey called her a "killing machine" those years back, she might as well live up to the title.

Jamming the knife back into her belt, she snatched up a Magnum from a corpse's hand and quickly smacked a Grunt with the butt of the gun, then used her elbow to shove the hapless victim to the ground and killed it with a single shot.

Beside her, Carter kicked another Grunt to the left and opened fire on the remainder of its companions. None of the enemies within the courtyard's perimeter seemed particularly deadly to Six and she supposed that it was their sheer number that had made it difficult for Kat to accomplish her task. Now between the four of them, Emile, Carter, Jorge, and Six made short work of the aggressors. But Six was only beginning to think that they were seeing the end of it when the twin _Spirits_ descended on the team.

"How are we doing, Kat?" Carter called over to her as he crouched behind a low lying wall beside Jorge, waiting for the heavy fire to cease. Six was stooped over across the way, listening to the Covenant forces unload; wishing for what must have been the tenth time that day that she had a sniper rifle in her hands instead of the shorter ranged DMR.

There was the sound of Kat gritting her teeth together. The sparks of the torch were reflected on her visor. "It's taking a little longer than I had hoped, commander. I'm just about half way through the door."

Beside Six, Emile crept around to the side of the forklift her shoulders were braced against. He fired his shotgun once, then cursed as blast of white-grey energy tore past him, caving into the wall. "Can't shoot a damn thing with that thing out there!" he grumbled. "You got contact, Jorge?"

"They've gotta move eventually," said Six rationally. "Their troops are moving in and they wouldn't risk getting them shot down by friendly fire."

With a nod, Carter agreed. "Wait it out, team. Keep them off our backs until Kat can get through."

"Jackals coming in round the back!" Jorge bellowed, turning his gun on the new enemies.

"They've sent out a couple Elites too," observed Emile, "Behind the Grunts." The skull on his EVO helmet seemed to wink at Six as he tore around the corner of the forklift and along the edge of the courtyard. Moments later, he sent an update along: "Took down the shields on the orange one. You prime for a headshot, commander?"

"Draw 'em out, Four," Carter replied and lifted the scope of his gun up to eye level.

That was when the suicidal Grunts come rushing in.

Plasma residue glowed blue at their fingertips as one grenade after another was thrown forward into the fray. Most bounced harmlessly off of the wreckage and makeshift barricades but at least one soared over Six's head, ricocheting off of the building's exterior and causing her to dive across the doorway to crouch beside Carter. She meant to hit the ground a few feet behind him but miscalculated the distance and the force of the consequential explosion behind her. She dove hands first into a roll behind her commander but accidentally caught his ankle with her elbow and caused his headshot to misfire and hit the Elite's shoulder.

"Damn it, Six," Carter growled as Jorge said, "It wasn't her fault. There was an explosion, commander. She had to get away from it."

"Guys?" Emile interrupted. "If you haven't noticed, there's an Elite over here and more drop ships coming in."

"Fall back, Emile. Kat?"

"Almost…. There. Got it."

"Alright, we're in," said Carter as the door slid open. "Fall back. Everybody. That's an order."

That last directive was given for the benefit of Six, whom, in the interests of redemption, was doing everything in her power to eliminate that last Elite. Only when the enemy fell did she turn back and start running even as the door began to close.

She sprinted past Jorge who was firing a few last shots of his own and tore through the door to join Carter and Kat. Jorge backed up, the shrinking doorway barely wide enough to accommodate his large frame and Emile remained outside for a dangerously long period of time. It was only when the door way nearly shut tight that Carter reached through and pulled his younger comrade into the complex.

The Covenant was shut out but that meant that Six was closed in with her new team whom, with perhaps the exception of Jorge, couldn't be too happy with her. She wondered which the better option was. Then the darkness of the room seemed to close in on her and she immediately decided that, given her choice, she'd have taken the former.

Six was shaken out of her thoughts by the sound of Emile rapping his armored knuckles against the door they'd just come through. "That'll hold them for a while," he observed with satisfaction. "Then the fun starts."

"It's dark enough for there to be plenty of 'fun' in here already, waiting for us," replied Jorge, adjusting his grip on his machine gun. "Keep your eyes open."

"Then I say we find the control room and Kat can make this place a little less dark," said Carter. "We need that relay back online. Emile, stick to this location. Any 'fun' comes along, it's all yours. Six, take flank. Kat, Jorge, let's move."

Resisting the urge to sigh in exasperation –she knew well enough that recent events had caused her a huge setback in her commander's respect for her –she followed them into the room. It was still dark but seemed peaceful, peaceful in the way that a cemetery was serene. There were enough bodies in the next room to fill a graveyard anyway –and a couple of live ones too.

A dead man was slumped over a dark console. Kat pushed the corpse aside as she moved to work on the controls. "Six," she said over her shoulder, "take a look at that body. See if there's some kind of reset code lying around."

As she turned the body over, running her gloved hand along the inside of the dead man's jacket, Carter knelt down beside a badly wounded but alive UNSC trooper. She looked up when she heard her commander speak quietly to the injured man but was careful to never focus on the trooper's face; somehow, she already knew what his fate would be and did not need the picture of him stamped into her memory.

"What happened to the rest of your unit?" said Carter a little more loudly but still in that same quiet, calm, and authoritative manner. "Do you know?" He handed the man a canteen from his belt.

"Never saw nothing," rasped the trooper between shallow gulps of water and equally shallow breaths. "We got split. I ended up here and they… It sounded bad, you know, over the comm. I don't think they made it. Covenant bastards took nearly everyone… Jake and Harrison and Kara… ah shit, they got Kara."

"It's alright, corporal. No one was expecting this. Now you stay put–"

"Not much else I can do," the soldier grinned weakly.

"–And we'll find you a combat surgeon. We'll have you up and at them again in no time."

The wounded man closed his eyes again and Carter got back to his feet. Six quickly looked back down at her task. "Kat?" he asked.

The other female Spartan made a little huff of vexation. "Well, it's plasma damage but what else would we have expected?"

In another corner of the room, Jorge sifted through rubble. "Can we fix it?" asked Carter as Six rolled the body she was inspecting over. Something fell out of the dead man's sleeve. She snatched it up, running her hand over the grooves and ridges of what she could only determine to be some kind of data module.

"If you mean 'me' when you say 'we,'" Kat was saying but Six interrupted her with her discovery.

"Found something," she said to Carter, unable to keep subtle notes of triumph from her tone. She was about to get up and join them at the control panel when Kat snatched the module from her hand.

"I'll be taking that, Six," she said, pinching the module between her robotic arm's fingers to inspect it. "Not your domain."

"Says you," Six muttered but her comment went unnoticed in the din as Jorge announced, "I've got another live one over here."

All three Spartans turned to look at the staircase as Jorge pulled a struggling girl out from behind the rubble. "Come on," murmured Jorge. "Come on out. I'm not going to hurt you. None of us are."

He turned, revealing a slim, dark haired girl in practical gray clothing trying her best to remain behind the rubble. She did not seem to believe him or was perhaps too frightened to even register what Jorge was saying because she continued to shout and pound her free fist down against the plating of his armor. Six averted her eyes. It might have been comical, watching this skinny little thing fight against a Spartan's strength and sheer mass, might have been funny had Six not been that girl; what felt like not so long ago.

"Jorge…" said Carter, a note of warning creeping into his tone.

Jorge gently placed his weapon upon the floor, propping the gun up against a mound of debris. "It's alright," he said, either to his commander or to the girl; Six didn't know. "I've got her. I've got you. Keep still and I promise I'll release you."

The girl went limp in his arms and he set her lightly down upon the rubble beside the staircase. "Are you alright?"

She shook her head feverishly, blubbering something in that same language of the farmers that Six hadn't bothered to learn. Frantically, she kept jerking her hand over Jorge's shoulder and for a moment Six thought that the girl was gesturing at her but the wounded soldier cried out in alarm.

Carter and Six's heads whipped around to watch as two Elites -that's what it looked like to Six; in the heat of the moment, she couldn't be sure of their number -swarmed the control room from three different entrances, snarling and brandishing high tech Covenant weapons. One occupied Kat and Carter's attention, nearly taking Kat's remaining arm if not for Carter shoving her out of the way, and the other advanced on the Jorge, its energy sword sweeping in a wide glowing arc over the big man's head as the he pushed the civilian girl down.

"_What's your status, over?_" said Emile's voice over the comm.

"We've been engaged!" spoke Carter in response. "Six, take the heat off Five."

An impulse –more reckless than brave –struck Six as the lingering closed in on Jorge, its ostensible target the girl. She snatched up her assault rifle from where it lay beside the dead man's corpse and charged the Elite, shooting all the while and watching its shields flicker to dead, only to have her gun knocked out of her hands and her body pushed down against the floor with the alien on top of her.

She didn't expect help from anybody as her attacker pulled back its energy sword for a fatal blow; she was accustomed to not relying on anybody but herself in these situations so she pulled back her own weapon –her fist –and socked the Elite in the jaw. Rewarded by the sound of a crack, she drew her free fist back again, winding up for another punch as the alien shoved its face into her visor, an intimidation tactic that Six would never admit out loud worked. Still, she screwed up her fist even tighter but then the alien's weight was lifted from her and tossed aside.

Carter –her implied liberator –kicked her assault rifle across the floor to her and she snapped it up in her grip. _Never again, _she told herself and lifted the gun, targeting the door that the Elites were in the process of retreating through, holding the wounded trooper up as a human shield. Carter froze; his gun was pointed at the door as well but the Elites disappeared down the corridor.

Screams –a man's very human screams –rose up and Six, losing herself again, snapped, "Why didn't you give the order to fire?"

"There was a civilian in the way, Six," was Carter's firm answer. "We don't fire on civilians."

Emile came running in. "Did those bastards get by me?"

"The man was dead anyway." She shook her head and sighed.

The screaming subsided. Kat stepped forward. "Well, he's dead now," she said emotionlessly.

"Permission to pursue?" asked Emile, wielding his shotgun.

"Negative. Four, guard the entrance. Two, get the girl. Five, Six, clear the hole."

Jorge grabbed his gun and followed Six to the door. She went through, casting a last glance back at the rest of her team before Jorge slammed the door shut, plunging them into blackness.

…

The Elite Specialist had cracked her helmet's visor and Six found herself holding her head at a funny angle as she attempted to manipulate a current and reset the junction to get it back online. "Fixing this is going to be a pain," she said over her shoulder to Jorge as her fingers manipulated the wiring.

"You talking about the junction?"

"No," she slammed the panel shut. "That's done. I'm talking about my helmet."

"We got spare visors," replied Jorge helpfully. "If you need help putting it together, Kat's good at that sort of thing."

"Spares sound good. For the record, I make a point on fixing my armor myself. Makes sure that I can put back together again myself, should the need arise."

"That's… self-reliant."

"My middle name."

Jorge cleared his throat. "Did you say the junction's up?"

"Up and running," she confirmed as she got back to her feet. "You can radio Carter and let him know. But I'm sure that Kat's figured it out by now."

"You don't want to do it yourself?"

She winced. "I'm not about to deal with Carter right now."

"Oh?" Jorge smirked to himself as he pulled off his helmet and motioned for her to follow him back to the control room. "You got a problem with our commander, Spartan?"

Grinding her teeth together as they walked, she answered, "I think he's got a problem with me."

"What makes you think that?"

"Oh, don't pretend that you haven't noticed the constant contention going on here."

"Can't pretend to save my life. You want to take that helmet off?"

"Why would I do that?"

"The crack's doing wonders for your coordination." Jorge suddenly grinned. "Plus I'm curious."

She looked at him with suspicion. "Are you trying to flirt with me?"

"Relax, Six. No intentions of that sort here. I bet I'm near twice your age anyway."

"I'm not that young," she replied stoutly.

"Oh? How old are you, grandmother?"

"Surely that was in my file."

"Surely you don't think I actually read that ONI crap." They'd reached a bridge and Six knew they were close to halfway back. "I like people to make their own first impressions. But, believe me; I heard plenty about you over the mess table, what with Kat and Carter."

"Well, what with them?" He shrugged and adjusted his grip on his gun. "They argued over you, as they did over near every candidate, save the ones they immediately rejected."

"What was there to argue about?"

"Oh, same old, same old. Basically, it came down to the fact that Kat wasn't nearly as keen on you as Carter was." He stopped abruptly. "Don't tell either of them I said that. I'd like to live to a ripe old age."

"What was that language you used with the farmers and the girl?"

"Hungarian. There are lots of them around here that speak the language."

"'Around here' meaning Reach?"

"Sure. What about you? Harmony?"

"French," she paused, realizing what she was giving away. "Some Flemish. We're nearly there. You grew up on Reach?"

"Sure I did."

"How was it?"

"Worse places to grow up in the galaxy. Here we are." The door was still latched shut. He set to work on the deadbolt and then paused. Jorge turned back to Six. "Look," he said, not unkindly, "the thing with you and Carter… well you're both good soldiers. You just need to act like it."

Kat was still hard at work at the controls as Six and Jorge entered. Carter glanced up from where he'd been lurking over Kat's shoulder, nodding in greeting at their approach. To Kat, he asked, "How long?"

Irritably, she answered, "I don't know how many times you've asked me that. I don't know how many times _everybody_'s asked me that. Question of my life."

"What's the answer?"

"Be more specific, commander. If you're asking how long until the entire's station's online, two weeks. This," she waved a hand at the entire console, "is plasma damage."

"Two minutes would be too long," replied Carter, rubbing his forehead wearily. Jorge shrugged at Six, then crossed the room toward Emile and the civilian girl. Six lingered. "We need to make contact with Holland now."

Kat shot him a patronizing look. "Which is why I'm slicing through to the main overland bundle to get you a direct uplink to the colonel," she explained patiently. "You're in my light, commander."

Wisely, Carter backed off. He glanced to Six. "Tough first mission," he said in a tone that belied his efforts at being reasonable. "Glad you pulled through."

Six opened her mouth to begin a retort but Jorge glanced over his shoulder. His hazel eyes seemed to meet hers through the cracked visor so instead she took a deep breath and replied, "I aim to please. Sorry about… back there."

"We look out for each other," he said evenly. "You did good work. Drive better than I do. That crack looks bad."

"Jorge tells me you've got spares."

"Not necessarily on hand. We'll get you something when… when we get picked up out of here."

"And when will that be, commander?" asked Emile with a contentious shrug from where he leaned against the wall opposite Six and Carter.

"We'll find out when Kat gets that uplink."

"I'm working on it, alright? This is plasma."

With a sigh, Carter turned back to Six. With a crooked smile, he said, "Get that all of the time. Something else, Six?"

Suddenly nervous, she shifted her weight. "I'm sorry about… I openly doubted your orders back there. It wasn't my place, sir."

"We're all under stress here, lieutenant. I don't typically give my soldiers long lectures in the middle of a hot zone."

She nodded, unsure of where to go from there and turned to lean against the wall and observe Jorge with Emile.

He was talking to the civilian girl in calm, reassuring tones, asking her simple questions and receiving simple answers in return. Six watched for a while, pensive. Emile shrugged at her. "Big man forgets what he is sometimes."

"She just lost her father," Jorge growled in an undertone to Emile, getting up and crossed the room toward Carter, and Six's heartbeat seemed to stop and then rebound at a pace twice as fast as before at this knowledge. To Carter he said, "She needs a full psychiatric workup."

"She's not the only one."

"Lock it down, both of you," said Carter but he looked to Emile in particular. "You're soldiers. Act like it. Get her on her feet." In a quieter voice, he added, "Body stays here."

Jorge looked doubtful so Six stepped forward. "Let me talk to her, commander," she said. Carter shrugged; he didn't seem to care either way. To Jorge, she asked, "What's her name?"

"Sara."

"Pretty name."

"That's what I said."

They smiled at each other even though Six knew Jorge couldn't see her sad grin and then she took Jorge's place opposite the civilian girl. "Hey," she said softly. "Jorge tells me your name's Sara."

"Yes," she didn't look up as she responded.

"You understand English?"

"Enough."

"Alright. I'm Six."

"That isn't a name." Sara's gray eyes flashed.

For a moment, she was taken aback. "You're right. My name's Jen. But don't tell the others; they'll make fun of me." She cracked a smile; remembered too late that Sara couldn't see it. "Jorge says that's your father."

"Yes."

"I'm sorry for your loss."

"What do you know of it?" Again, a blaze sparked in those gray eyes.

"More than I'd like to admit." She was conscious of all eyes in the room save Kat's on her. Clearing her throat, she continued, "We need to get you out of here, Sara. I know it's hard but your father would want you to be safe and so do we. Let's get you on your feet."

She rose, held out a hand, and Sara took it. The girl got to her feet and Six lightly touched her shoulder before looking at Jorge, Carter, and Emile. "You're right, Emile," she said coolly. "She's not the only one." And then she pushed past Carter and into the open space behind them.

Kat broke the silence with a pleased sigh of triumph. "Commander, signal's there. It's patchy, but it's there."

Carter looked away from Six's back and replied, "I'll take it."

As he crossed the room, Kat responded in a gently teasing voice, "Best not touch anything. You wouldn't want to ground the place like you did before."

He smiled at her and then Holland's voice came over the speaker: "_I'm barely getting you. What's your situation, over?_"

"Colonel, it's Noble One." Six turned to watch as his face seemed to age five years with his next few words. "There are no rebels. The Covenant is on Reach. Acknowledge?"

"_Come again, Noble One. Did you say 'Covenant'?_"

"Affirmative. It's the Winter Contingency."

There was a long silence and Six wondered if the connection had been grounded after all. She looked to Kat but the Spartan made no movement to repair the uplink. Then: "_Then God help us all._"

She leaned back against the wall again. Idly, she wondered if in fifty years the big question of the century she'd be hearing would be, "Where were you when the Covenant was contacted on Reach?"

Or whether they would even live that long. 


	5. Hearing Damage

**Winterbirth**

_A Halo Reach Fan Fiction by Marianne Bennet_

**A/N**: Back on the map again. I probably had the most fun (and probably the most stress) yet writing this chapter and trying to capture everyone's characters. Sorry folks, but there's no combat involved. Wait until next update for that. 'Thank you's go out to my wonderfully loyal reviewers and my beta-reader EternalEntity. Thanks so much you guys! Enjoy.

**Five: Hearing Damage**

_July 25__th__, 2552 _

When the Falcon came down on the twin boxes of buildings that Noble Team called "home," she stepped out of the vehicle and crossed the space between the drop-off and the door in four large strides. She walked through a hallway of empty rooms until she came upon her modest duffel bag propped up on the top bunk of the two-person, cell-like compartment she was to share with Kat for the next… however long.

There were drawers to the right of the bunk bed but Six didn't bother with unpacking. She doubted that anyone in Noble Team would. Not this time anyway, not with this new kind of uncertainty of where they would go next, what would happen next, what would become of them all, of anyone on Reach. But there was no time for any doubts so they all had to deal with the immediate assurance of change and rapid change at that. If faith could be weighed in fiscal units, Six would bet quite a few pennies on the constant of uncertainty.

It was late night or rather perhaps early morning. The crack in her visor had splintered into a five-pronged sunburst, creating a sort of kaleidoscope everywhere she looked. She could feel the throb of a migraine coming on slow and steady like a pulse, a beating heart trapped inside a confining head. Or maybe that was just the effect of the helmet; she hadn't taken it off since the ride in all those hours ago when she should have told herself to expect nothing and therefore never find disappointment.

There were no windows in the small room though the crack in the visor created the illusion of looking out through a windowpane onto an outer world. She wanted to sleep but the visor had to be fixed; better take care of that tonight… She reached up and pulled the helmet off, felt her braids come down around her shoulders.

"So that's why you keep it on?" She turned to watch Kat step through the open doorway, a smirk flickering on her slightly pointed features. "Gets you past regulations, doesn't it?"

She snorted outright and then pulled her bag off of the bed. "Gonna report me?" she asked carelessly.

"You think I care?" Kat unbuckled the various pouches and belts hanging down around her armor and tossed them to the floor. Undoing the strap on her left boot with one hand, she leaned over with her other and slapped the controls. The door slid shut and vaguely fluorescent lights gleamed overhead. She kicked the boot off and added, "As long as you get the job done, I won't go looking for an excuse to get rid of you."

Six undid the last buckle on the armor covering her torso and shrugged out of the straps holding the plating together, catching it with one hand and dropping it lightly to the ground. Leaving the mesh underlay where it hung loosely on her frame, she shoved her belt and all of the plating attached to it down to pool around her boots like rubble. Leaning over to wiggle her right foot out of confinement, she replied, "You assume that you can find one."

"Trust me, Six." She yanked off her gloves, flexing one hand and then the other, mechanical one in slow succession. "I can always find grounds to back up whatever I want to prove."

"You sure that's not a little arrogant?"

Kat shrugged, seemingly artless in her argument. "I think highly of my abilities. Don't plan on going to bed anytime soon; the commander will want to debrief and then we'll find out where we're going next."

The left boot came off with a satisfying pop. Six lined it up in a row with its partner then rolled up the pliable sleeves of her mesh shirt, folded her arms, leaned against the bedpost, and asked, "Why do you call Carter 'commander' all of the time?"

Straightening up after organizing her various pieces of armor in neat succession against the opposite wall, Kat responded, "Why do you assume that I call him that 'all of the time'?"

"It's just what I've been picking up since I got here," she replied, surprisingly mild in manner as she propped up her foot against the metal beam she leaned against. "I haven't heard you call him anything else, even when talking about him with other people."

She scowled. "What other people?"

Six allowed a smirk of her own to cross her face. "Me."

Rolling her eyes dramatically, Kat said, "You're committing a fallacy with that argument, Six. You have hardly been around here long enough to make that kind of assumption."

"Still," she unfolded herself with a predator's grace and stood with a small smile, "you're awfully defensive. Is something going on?"

Kat closed her eyes for a moment and then opened them, pupils darting skyward then resting on Six. "Carter," she drew the name out, "will probably be waiting for us by now along with everyone else. Are going to come as you are or will you hide behind your helmet again?"

Setting her mouth into a firm, steady line, she answered, "I'll come as I am; thanks." Still, she picked her helmet up in one hand, bracing it between her hip and the crook of her elbow. Either way, it needed to be fixed.

There was a rapping noise coming from the hallway. "We're waiting on you," said Emile from the other side of the door. He paused for a moment, then added, "We're waiting on you _again_, Kat."

She lunged for the door's controls. "That was one time!" said Kat icily as the door slid open to reveal Emile standing outside, the collar of his t-shirt damp and his closely cropped curls wet from what must have been a quick shower. "That was one time and yet you never let me forget it. When will you let it alone?"

"When I'm dead," he proclaimed with a suddenly evil grin. "And not even then," he caught Six's eye over Kat's shoulder. "Get this, Six: we're set on by insurrectionists in the middle of the night and we're all suited up –except for Kat –and commander's yelling for her to get out there and she comes running out in–"

Kat shoved him and Emile's back hit the wall. "Don't ever repeat it," she said in a voice so low, it was deadly. "I was hardly out of training and we had the new armor. Besides, Jun told me about the time you two were out on night watch and–"

Emile threw up his hands in surrender, nearly choking with laughter. "Alright, I surrender! I surrender, alright?" Eyes narrowed, Kat stepped back into the doorway. He glanced past her into the room, getting a better look at the newest member of the time. "Nice braids, newbie," he snorted and turned to go. As he jogged back down the narrow hallway, he threw over his shoulder, "I wasn't kidding. We're waiting on both of you."

As he turned the corner, Kat let loose a sigh of utter exasperation. "He just insists on…" she began to mutter to herself then turned around, remembering Six's presence. "Never mind that. We should go."

"What happened with Emile on night watch?" Six raised her eyebrows.

"As though I knew," Kat admitted. "Jorge mentioned it once. Nothing in detail but I know it's enough to get Emile running and that's enough for me. Come on."

As they started down the hallway, Six asked, "Why'd they have the base moved?"

"Besides the obvious reasons?"

"Yes, besides those."

She sighed. "Besides aiming for a more secure location for our HQ, there was something that ONI wanted. Holland had it airlifted out and now here we are. Convenient, isn't it?"

They turned a corner and Six felt her heart rate pick up. She willed it to slow its pace. "What'd ONI want with us?"

"Carter wouldn't say. And if he wouldn't tell me, the others don't know either."

"Maybe he just didn't tell you."

Her head turned to cast Six a condescending look. "If anyone's going to get anything out of him, it's going to be me. Sometimes it's like prying open a clam but the commander and I have known each other for a long time."

"How long?"

"Why are you asking me?"

Six shrugged. "No reason."

"Then don't ask."

They were approaching another door. Almost by reflex, Six caught up her braids in one hand, a hair tie in the other, and twisted her hair into a low bun at the nape of her neck as she walked. She paused by the door as Kat went in, gathered herself in two deep breaths, reminded herself that she was alright, and crossed the threshold into the dimly lit room.

Carter barely glanced up from a report or something of that nature as she and Kat entered. Emile, lounging against the back of his chair, grinned at them. "Look who finally decided to show," he drawled.

"Don't start that up again, Emile," Jorge advised, stepping forward. He was still in armor and had a narrow curved sheet of strong, glass-like material in his big hand. He tossed it across the room to Six with a smile, saying, "Better get to work on that helmet, Six; you've got second watch."

"Solo?"

"No, with me," Carter pushed his report across the table and away from him as he spoke. "You still have that module, Kat?"

"It's safe and sound. Are you discussing it in your report?"

"Just mentioning it. Holland said that if we found it on one of the scientists at the outpost, it's something that needs to be dealt with directly with ONI."

"Do you they need us to do something for them, commander?" asked Jun, leaning his elbows against his knees as he sat down. Six's eyes traced the tattoo etched upon the left side of his face, wondering what a fist full of arrows could mean to him, what it meant to her for that matter.

"Depends on where Holland's told to put us. They've got some sway but not enough to make our own decisions for us. Jun, Jorge, first watch?"

"My cue to stop asking questions?" said Jun wryly, getting to his feet and shouldering his sniper rifle. "We'll head out there now, commander."

Six widened her eyes at Jorge for a moment as the two Spartans passed her on their way to the door, pleading for the big man to find some reason to stay, to keep a friendly face in the room. But he just smiled at her and passed on. She stifled a groan. God, an entire watch with that self-righteous idiot; what was she going to do?

She knew the answer to that question well enough: she'd grit her teeth and get on with it, take everything in stride, leave nothing open, just like a fight. Let impulses, not emotions, take over again; they'd keep her safe just like they did in a hot zone. She summoned up her instinct for self-preservation and sat down.

Emile was slurping noodles in between lines of a conversation with Kat about the uses of knives. Apparently, she didn't carry on. Catching Six's eye, he said, "C'mon, Kat, even the newbie's sent enough bastards off on their way with a knife."

"Once you get that close to an Elite," she began, "you've already put yourself at enough risk. They have knifes too. And, more times than not, I've seen you sneak up on one of them only to get an energy sword shoved in your face. Remember back on–"

"One time, Kat," he protested, balancing his chair on two legs and twisting his torso to the right to toss the empty carton into the trash.

"Twice."

The chair fell forward onto all fours as he leaned forward again. "Once," he insisted. In a lower voice, he added, "That time was only a stupid grunt that'd picked up a sword and didn't know what to do with it."

"It knew enough to attempt to sever your spine."

"And failed. I like to remember that part of the story. Almost done with that report, commander?"

"Shouldn't you be sleeping, Emile, Kat? You have until third."

"I'll sleep when I'm dead. Besides, our Number Two needs to be reminded of a couple of choice details about me and my knife and I seem to need some back-up. Commander?"

Carter briefly looked up, a grin etched on his weary face. "I remember that time with the grunt too, Emile."

"Shit, I'm for bed then." He got up and stretched, his lean, wiry frame extending like a cat's. "Wake me in… whenever you guys get back, Carter."

Six moved to an empty table across the room from Carter's. Placing the new visor down upon the rickety tabletop, she began unzipping the black mesh from the interior of her helmet. Kat lingered as well, saying, "Any ideas of where we'll be deployed next?"

Tapping his name and call number into place on the tablet, he replied, "The colonel's being surprisingly tight lipped. I'd guess that we'll be going to wherever we're needed in the morning. No distress calls yet; either the Covenant's lying low or they've cut off whomever they've attacked next. Though we'd definitely deploy a team if any areas are cut off entirely, especially after what happened with us. If there are issues, maybe other teams are handling it; I don't know. You should catch up on a few hours too, Kat."

"I'm doing alright, commander." Six listened intently as she ran the edge of a razor blade around the perimeter of the cracked visor, separating what remained of once heavy glue. The heavy glass-like plate lifted free in her hand; it seemed her helmet had been due for an update either way.

"'Alright' isn't enough. We've all been through a lot today and we all need to be in top shape for tomorrow. Understood?"

With a snort, she replied, "You know can't order me around, Carter?"

"I can sure as hell try. C'mon, Kat. You know I'm right."

"You know you shouldn't say that."

He started to grin. "You know I can definitely order you around."

She rolled her eyes. "You know I always win these. But I'll put you out of your misery, commander, and go to bed."

He smiled again, the sort of smile that made Six feel as though her very presence was an intrusion. She understood that feeling; what she didn't understand is why she suddenly wanted to flee. What did that mean? She decided to address that at a later time and focus now on tracing the edge of the new visor with fresh glue as Kat left the room. Pinching the hard, glassy sheet between the thumb and forefinger of her right hand, she reached for her helmet with the other and carefully dropped the visor into place.

"Will that thing be dry in time for your watch?"

Carter's voice surprised her; she had thought he had forgotten she was there. Glancing up, she answered, "It better be. I don't like breathing in half-dried glue." Six pressed down on the visor again and then used the edge of her sleeve to wipe away the fingerprints. "How long have you and Kat known each other?"

"Since the beginning. Or that's what it feels like at least." He crossed the room to an uplink site near the control panel. "We've been through a lot, both as team members and as… friends."

"You care about her."

"That's not the kind of thing I go about discussing with people I've just met." His tone seemed hard as he turned to look her in the eye. His eyes were blue like a lake iced over with cold and snow; the helmet hadn't let her see that before.

She looked away from his face, down at her hands. There was a strand of glue still clinging to her thumb, as thin and translucent as spider web, and she somehow felt fragile in much the same way. Six moved her wrist and felt the minute tension of the thread just before it broke. "Fair enough," Six replied evenly. "It isn't as though I have to tell you anything about me either." She scooped up her helmet from the table and moved to the door. "I'll see you at second watch."

Carter watched her go and she felt some kind of bitter satisfaction at leaving him alone in that big room. She knew she'd probably regret being so abrupt very soon: late night watches weren't her forte to begin with and now she was very certain that she was about to experience the most awkward two hours of her time spent with Noble Team so far.

…

"It's raining."

She felt like an idiot for saying something so obvious. Anything with eyes could see it was raining; that didn't exactly prove her worth to anybody. She winced and hated the rain for simply… being there.

At the other side of the narrow base, Carter didn't respond in any way that she may have predicted him to. He didn't consent to making meaningless small talk, or even simply agree, do anything to defuse the silent tension. Over the patter of the rain against the metal roof behind her, he replied, "_Your powers of perception are frightening_."

Scowling, she said, "Well, how about you? Do _you_ see anything of interest?"

"_Negative. Cloud cover's too dense to see anything in the sky. Fog's too thick to see anything down in the valley. You?_"

"Same."

"_I'm not surprised._"

"Why would you be?"

"_What do you mean?_"

Irritation rising up, she snapped, "It's all the same. If there's fog and cloud cover over there, that means that there's fog and clouds over here and yet you're acting like I'm copying your answers down on an exam."

"_Calm down, Six. You're reading too much into things._" She heard him sigh. "_Anything on radar?_"

"Negative. How about on your end?"

"_If I had something, I wouldn't be asking._"

She didn't reply to that. She waited to hear him say something, hear him do something, sigh, anything, but there was nothing save her own breathing and, once in a while, the sound of his. She waited a while, looking out into the mist, up into the marine layer shrouding their location, once in a while at her radar, and then she realized that she was listening for the sound of his breathing, confirmation that she wasn't by herself out on that ridge in the dark.

She didn't like consciously knowing that she was doing that so she had to say something to divert her mind: "What's up with Jorge and the Covenant?"

"_Reach is his home. He doesn't like people –or in this case, Covenant –threatening it_."

"He's awfully testy about it."

"_Do you blame him?_"

She remembered the sound of the door being broken down, of foreign footsteps. "No," she found herself answering. "No, I don't. Not at all. I don't blame him at all."

"_You alright over there?_"

She was hearing damage. "I'm fine," she said. "Count on it."

"_I don't count on anybody being fine. Not by themselves, sometimes not even then. Not anymore._"

"You've got to trust someone to be alright on their own sometime."

"_Do you?_"

"I'm always my number one person to get the job done."

"_You've never had to be in a position where you're relying on somebody else to get something done on their own and you have little to no effect on whether they get out there alive, let alone finish the job._"

"That's true. But I've never wanted to be a leader."

"_Except of yourself._"

"I guess that's where the 'lone wolf' stuff comes in."

"_It has to be left behind, Six, especially now with everything that's going on._"

"Are you trying to talk to me about Thom?"

He didn't say anything.

"It weighs on you, doesn't it?"

Still, he said nothing.

"Doesn't it?"

The rain came down harder. She pressed her boot down into the ground, felt the mud give way beneath her foot. "You should know by now that you can't get rid of me that easily."

His voice, when he spoke, was dry. "_You've barely been here a day, Six. I could get rid of you if I really wanted to._"

"Why does everyone keep telling me that? First Kat, now you… Is Jorge the only one who actually wants to like me?"

"_I warned you that this wasn't going to be easy._" She heard the sting of his critical tone coming on and hated him for it. "_Should've left the attitude at the door._"

"I was just playing off of the signals I was getting." She paused and then dove in. "Do you have a problem with me, commander?"

"_I could ask you the same question. I know we don't see eye to eye on a lot of things._"

"I think it's something else."

"_You tell me._"

"I'm not sure what it is yet," she replied, lifting a gloved hand to wipe the rain from her visor.

She heard his smile. "_Tell me when you figure it out._"

"Believe me, I will." She felt her own lips curve and planted her feet into the soft earth. She'd wait him out if she could do nothing else.

…

Kat was already gone when she stumbled back into their room, armor muddied, mind exhausted. She moved in a daze, pulling her duffel bag off of the top bunk, stripping out of her armor and down into her skivvies, pulling on a pair of sweats and a t-shirt. She scaled the bed frame and rolled under the thin covers, pressing her ear against the pillow as though she could muffle sounds that were only in her head. It was then that she heard the voices coming from next door.

_Are these walls paper thin?_ She wondered, sitting up in bed to loosen the knot of hair at the back of her head. Slight red curls came down around her face as the braids came loose. The next room over was… Jorge's? That meant he must share it with Carter for she recognized Noble Leader's voice only too well. Unable to resist, she pressed her ear to the wall.

"You don't like her?"

"It's not that." That was Carter talking. "She just reminds me a little too much of Thom for my peace of mind."

"Funny," said Jorge thoughtfully.

"What?"

"I was about to say that she reminded me of how you were, not too long ago."

"Yeah?" Carter sounded skeptical. "And then I got careful." In a lower voice –she had to strain to hear his next words –he added, "I hope it doesn't take her that much to teach her caution. I wouldn't like to see her get burned."

She fell back down against her pillow and stared at the low ceiling. It seemed to press down on her. She fell asleep with much more to think about than a simple Covenant attack.


	6. Loathing

**Winterbirth**

_A Halo Reach Fan Fiction by Marianne Bennet_

**A/N**: I promised you all combat in this next chapter and I'm glad I was able to deliver. Thanks go out as usual to my beta-reader EternalEntity as well as my lovely reviewers whose feedback encourage me to bring my eye (and pen) back to this story. Enjoy!

**Six: Loathing**

_July 26__th__, 2552 _

The rain had stopped hours ago. Its constant pattering against the base's metal roof had ceased by dawn, pushed west by early morning sunlight. Six, fast asleep in her bunk, hadn't seen the sunrise and was instead awakened by another, less pleasant sign that it was morning and time to get up: Someone was pounding on the door of the compartment, the knocks coming sharp and sudden like the thrusts of a blade.

Six rolled over in her bed, pulling the blankets with her as she turned to face the wall. She feigned sleep, momentarily forgetting that she was the only occupant of the room and therefore the only one who could open the door. The knocking continued. Yanking the pillow out from under her head, pulling it down around her ears, and forgetting who and where she was all in one swoop, she mumbled, "Go away."

"Not likely," responded Carter grimly from the other side of the door. "Open the door, Six."

She half-fell half- climbed down the bed frame, dropping down to the floor. After making sure that her bare feet were planted firmly against the ground, she walked over to the door and punched in the buttons to open it.

The door slid open and Carter was revealed to be completely suited up from the neck down in blue armor. She folded her arms and squinted past the fluorescent glare of the hallway's overhead lighting, wondering what he was thinking as he looked over rumpled sweats, creased t-shirt, and hair in a red cloud around her face.

His answer came immediately: "You look like the morning after leave," he said flatly.

She scowled. "Thanks. Are we heading out?"

"Sword Base got hit just before dawn," Carter replied. "They were holding fine until about twenty minutes ago. They've officially requested our assistance." He glanced behind her into the room. "Where's Kat?"

"Still on watch with Emile I assume. You told them yet?"

"No need if she's there. They're already suited up then."

"What about Jun then?"

"He barely sleeps as it is. He sounded as though he was already half-way to being ready when I knocked. Unlike others. You gonna be ready for today?"

She remembered what she had heard him say the previous night to Jorge and her face flamed. Emotions that she had been too tired to acknowledge let alone address the night before came flaring up like the makeshift distress beacon she'd had to light all those years back. Why did he care if she was alright, if she was ready? Why did he care if she got burned? It wasn't as though she could be; she told herself that she had walked through fire before and come forth unscathed. But what did he care?

He took another look at her and frowned. "Your hair's past regulation length."

She bit the inside of her cheek until she tasted metal and then she couldn't hold it in anymore. "I figured out our problem," she said suddenly. "I just hate you."

"I know," was his dry response. "I think Emile said that at one point too. Let's get moving."

…

The Corvette cast a heavy shadow over the rugged and rocky terrain upon which Sword Base was perched. Six's hands idly toyed with the scope of her DMR as the Falcons swooped across the half-frozen ocean. She looked down onto white-tipped waves lapping against the rocky shore and then glanced up at Carter and Kat in the seats across from her. Six wondered idly why she always chose the solitary seat in the Falcon, Pelican, whatever vehicle Noble Team happened to be using at the moment.

She watched as Kat slipped a chip into a data pad before sighing and staring down into the sea once more. Ice lingered where land met water, sometimes white, sometimes grey, and every once in a while the stormy blue-grey of Carter's eyes. Six immediately checked herself. Why the hell of all things, at this moment in time, was her mind choosing to recall _that_? There were much more important matters at hand, as Carter would surely have reminded her himself. She said she hated him and he hadn't sounded surprised. He had even said that Emile said the same thing.

Damn, why did she keep thinking about that?

The twin Falcons descended on the besieged base as Carter called out instructions: "We can't do anything about that cruiser yet, team. So, let's just focus on giving those troopers a hand down there. Kat, Six, you're up first. Jorge, Emile, be ready 'cause you're up next."

"Understood, commander," said Kat. She then looked to Six as though expecting her teammate to respond in kind to her commander but Six said nothing.

She dropped out of the Falcon, falling feet first through seven feet of empty air, felt her knees buckle and absorb the shock as she hit the courtyard ground. With a quick turn of her head to the right, she surveyed the situation: a flock of jackals coming down the staircase, a fleet of grunts pouring forth from a second courtyard beyond the first. She pulled out her assault rifle and made short work of the enemy infantry, raining down bullets on the grunts.

Kat swept up the stairs, nailing three jackals with close range head shots. "Lieutenant, go around left. We'll trap the forces on the walkway between us."

Sprinting up the stairs as advised, Six knocked out another jackal from behind and shoved a grunt over the railing. She tried not to listen as it screamed. Kat was dispatching the remaining two grunts on the walkway when a voice buzzed in over Six's comm.: "_Spartans, this is Sword Control. Be advised that there are hostile forces north of your position._"

"Thanks," said Six over the din of the Elites and UNSC troopers locked in battle beneath them, "but we've got visual now."

"Keep us posted," added Kat. She reloaded her magnum, muttering, "Let's go knock some heads."

Six squinted through the scope of her DMR until she found what she was hoping for. "How about you go down there and run interference?" she suggested.

"And what will you be up to while I'm risking my ass out there?"

"Sniping and you'll be thankful for it."

"I assume you've had experience?"

She shrugged. "Just years and years in a Spec Ops team," Six responded. "I'll see you down there."

Taking off before Kat could object, she raced left, hugging the wall to remain unnoticed by the Elites down below. She peeked over the edge and groaned to herself. Specialists; God, how she hated specialists but it wasn't as though they could not be avoided or ignored. They just needed to be properly dealt with while she maintained the element of surprise.

She found the sniper rifle leaning up against the railing next to a fallen soldier. The torso of his body hung precariously slumped over the edge and she tried to ignore it as she traded her gun for his. There was no time for dignity for the dead. Taking stock of the situation, she saw that the living troopers –the ones that she should be thinking of –had sturdy barricades that unfortunately did not cover much ground. Elites darted around and across the front line –the only line actually –and as they leapt back they took soldiers with them.

Kat had taken her suggestion, dancing forward and back, tempting one Elite after the next to come out from behind the barricades the UNSC troopers had already ceded to the Covenant. Six was careful to line up her shots and one by one in quick, quiet succession, they fell.

Soldiers, some fresh for the fight, some already nursing flesh wounds, rushed forward to reclaim lost territory. Grunts fell, then jackals, and Six felt the quiet victory of someone whom had enabled a triumph but took no part in the celebration.

There was only one shot left in the sniper rifle and Six let it fall forward to the floor with regret. She picked up the DMR she had discarded earlier as she made her way back down the stairs to the ground level, thinking about how exasperating it was that both she and Carter preferred the same weapon.

She stopped in her tracks. That _had _to end. She was on a mission here; she told herself there were only so many thoughts she could allow herself to think before past events began to overwhelm her. She needed to make those thoughts count for something important.

Kat was at the mouth of a large gate. Its heavy doors remained firmly shut as she spoke into her comm.: "Noble Two to Sword Control: courtyard is clear, over. What's beyond this gate?"

"_Head through the gate to the east, ma'am. We'll brief you as you go but there are heavy enemy weaponry out there._"

Six opened the gate with a quick movement of her wrist and then sprinted forward to catch a glimpse of exactly what they were up against: twin enemy Wraiths.

She checked the ordinance, roughly clicking open cases, paying no mind as DMRs and magnums clattered to the floor. "Sword Control, this is Noble Six. I'm looking at a Target Locater right now. Can we do anything with it?"

"_Our artillery is limited._" Six made a noise of exasperation that she knew they could hear. "_But we'll be sure to prioritize anything you need. Ma'am._"

"Thank you," said Kat as Six jammed the Locater into her belt.

"We have to wait for the two Wraiths to get far enough apart before we call in the heavy guns," said Six without preamble, starting down the ramp in a crouch.

"Why not wait for the opposite and destroy them both in a single shot?"

"Because that would be a waste of a good tank and we could use a tank right now."

Kat considered this. "The Locater will need some time to load up. I'll deal with the ground forces while you power it up."

"Just don't get too close to either Wraith."

"Do you think I was born yesterday?" Kat sounded like she was smiling. "Relax, Six. Don't get all worked up or I'll start to think you're Carter's long lost twin. Just call the locks out."

Crouching behind the cover of a mound of boulders, Six synched up one of the Wraith's positions, hoping to have the artillery hit the general area around the tank and spring lucky. The Target Locator did one better and locked onto the Wraith itself. She called out the lock to Kat, hoping her fellow Spartan heeded the warning and watched as the ground shook under the pounding of the artillery.

"_The artillery eliminated most of the ground troops,_" Kat informed her over the comm. "_I'm taking care of the rest. You have a plan to commandeer that Wraith; you better put it into action now._"

The big guns had been the end of a small cluster of grunts. Six rolled each of their corpses over in turn with her foot, watching blood blossom over the toe of her boot, until she found what she was looking for: a live plasma pistol that tumbled freely out of a corpse's loose grip.

A low buzz filled her ears, drowning out all other sound. The Wraith, diverted by the distraction of Kat and three surviving troopers, was circling, moving closer to Six's position by the second until she could count the fingers of the Elite's hand on the turret control. She was perfectly poised for a hijack; now it was all in the timing.

Stooping even lower, concealing her form amongst the fallen grunts, she was suddenly grateful for the red paint job on her Spartan armor. The Wraith, mindless and insensible of its fallen, lesser comrades' bodies, moved in a course as to directly graze over both the grunts and Six. She held her breath as the buzzing grew louder, more obnoxious, like that time she'd walked into a hornet's nest and had been foolish enough to kick it, and silently counted out, _One, two…_

She jumped, cutting a graceful arc through the air like a gymnast. She hit the Wraith hands and feet first, her palms down against the metal hull absorbing the shock of contact and then arched, clinging like a spider as she half-crawled half-climbed her way upward.

The big gun was directly overhead as she clambered atop the Wraith and Six had to throw her weight right to keep from becoming kindling when the Wraith fired next. The Elite in the turret station aboard the tank did not look happy to see her but she silenced his cry of outrage with her fist. While he was still knocked back by her uppercut, she braced the soles of her boots against the hull, dug her fingers beneath the alien's shoulders, lifted him out of his seat, and shoved him into the path of the Wraith.

He howled for a moment, trying to claw away across the rough terrain, before the unavoidability of his demise overwhelmed him and he was silent. Six shifted her attention to the driver, pulling her knife from her belt and slicing a smile just below the alien's sneer. She tossed his still twitching body aside and took his place in the driver's seat.

"Sword Control, Kat," she said into her comm. "The Wraith is ours. Repeat: the Wraith is ours. Cease fire."

"_Understood, Noble Six._"

"What's up next?" she asked, testing out the big gun on a trio of jackals.

"_The old Farragut Station to the east has its own comm. array that can probably be brought back online and link us up with command. However, Airview Base, directly west of your position, has an anti-air battery that will help clear the skies._"

"How good is that gun?" asked Kat, running forward to take her place in the turret station.

"_It's very capable, ma'am._"

"That Corvette and its Banshees are our immediate issue here," said Six. "I vote we take out the Covenant's air support a-sap"

"Agreed," said Kat. "We go west then. Keep us posted, Sword Control."

"_Will do, ma'am._"

Kat tested out her turret's capabilities. "I should ask," she spoke up. "You do know how to drive this sort of vehicle, don't you?

West meant toward the ocean, which meant left. Six had never driven any Covenant vehicle of this size but she had no time for self-doubt or, for that matter, Kat's doubts. She turned the controls left, the Wraith went left, and that was enough for her. "I'm a fast learner," she replied as they moved forward.

"Good to know," muttered Kat. "I'm picking up an area power source. We must be getting close to that gun. Skirmishers on left."

"No longer a problem," she replied as she ran them over.

"Very messy, lieutenant," commented Kat distastefully.

"But expedient."

"You sound like Emile."

"Yeah," she leapt out of the Wraith as they came up on the gun. "I get told that a lot."


	7. Killing Dance

**Winterbirth**

_A Halo Reach Fan Fiction by Marianne Bennet_

**A/N**: It's been a couple of (hectic) days and I am very happy to have this out for you all. Thank you's to my reviewers and my trusty beta-reader EternalEntity! Enjoy!

**Seven: Killing Dance**

_July 26__th__, 2552 _

The console flickered to life as Six pressed her palm against the gate controls. "What kind of welcome do you think we'll be getting?" she asked Kat as they crossed the space between the ramp and the courtyard, guns trained forward. She had seen movement just as the gate had begun to open and she wanted a second opinion on whether she could just start shooting immediately.

"If the commander and the rest of the team are in trouble, it's unlikely that the survivors held out for very long down here without us," answered Noble's other female Spartan. "It'd be a miracle, actually."

Six grimaced in response just before plasma streaked the air to the left; all of her questions were answered in the instant. Reloading her DMR, she bared her teeth behind the helmet as the three elites closed in.

"Six, left!" Kat yelled out as she leapt back out of reach from an attacker's grasp, a deadly blur of turquoise streaking a path across the courtyard.

She chose to take heed of her team member's warning, ducking down as the second elite's arm swung overhead and, in the same movement, she snatched the opportunity to pull her magnum from its holster at the small of her back as her knees absorbed the shock. As she had predicted, her attacker was unable to recover his momentum and, rather than his original aim of pushing her down to the ground with him, he toppled over the small of her back alone.

In an instant, Six had shoved herself upward from her crouch, turned to look down at her opponent, and did not hesitate to pull the trigger. As the shot rang out, a snarl sounded from behind. She turned in time to watch an amber-armored elite come rushing forward into the fray. In a split second, she took stock of the glimmer of active shielding and looked to the alien she had already felled. Sure enough, there was a plasma rifle, ripe for the taking and Six, holding her ground, pumped shot after shot into the charging assailant.

She squeezed the trigger until she thought her thumb might shatter, watching for the flicker of strained shields, but the rifle soon fizzled in her hand. The elite was about three yards away. Perhaps she had overtaxed its capabilities or maybe it had run out of ammo; she did not have time to consider either scenario. She grabbed her knife and braced for impact but there was none. She only watched as the alien went down before her eyes.

Kat reloaded her own magnum. "Emile doesn't know everything one can accomplish without the crutch of a knife to fall back on," she said, sounding immensely satisfied with her own performance. "Come along now, Six. Let's give the commander a hand."

She followed her toward the interior of the base but could not help but remark, "I thought everybody was in trouble up there. Jorge and Emile and Jun…"

"And just when I was about thinking that I might be able to like you after all, you go on and say something ridiculous. Hurry up. We have an elevator to catch."

"It's hardly a clear path to the atrium," Six noted, checking her radar. "We've got a couple of targets showing up… big ones too."

"What do you mean 'big'?" Kat started to say when a blinding green flash answered her. She checked herself then rushed forward to scope out the situation. "Damn. Six, we've got hunters."

Moving forward, she asked, "How many?"

"Two; it's always two. Plus, there looks like an elite's manned the elevator." She looked to Six. "I say we take them both together."

She bit her upper lip, considering. "Why don't we take out the elite first?" she suggested. "Give us some cover."

Kat grabbed three grenades from a nearby rack. Following her lead, Six grabbed a shotgun. "Sounds like a plan, Spartan," replied Kat. "Move along the perimeter."

"_We're still stalled in the atrium._ _Kat, Six?_"

"We're dealing with hunters here, Jun," Kat informed him, snapping the lock off one of the fresh grenades and lobbing it across the room. It clattered through the doorway opposite them. "Suffice to say we're a little tied up!" she shouted over the explosion. "But we'll be there soon."

The first hunter had been alerted by the elite's cry of outrage. It looked to its right, where the grenade had originated, and Six sprinted around to her massive opponent's left. She pressed her shotgun to its back and felt the tension as she pulled the trigger.

The colossal creature cried out, forewarning its companion, but did not fall. It shuffled, trying to shake the Spartan, but Six traveled with her adversary, reloading her shotgun as she moved with it in some macabre killing dance of universal invention. Another shot made it howl and, out of the corner of her scout helmet, Six saw Kat advancing on the other hunter. In a rare moment of whimsy as she reloaded once more, she thought she could see the gears of Kat's brain churn into action, evaluating and reevaluating. Pity Six could never think out an attack in quite the same way but why require lengthy forethought when one already had instincts?

Instincts told Six to pull the trigger a third time and she obeyed, lingering on the coolness of the metal beneath her fingers and imagining the heat of the resounding blast. She let emotions bleed out of her, be momentarily purged from her existence, as the creature fell forward, leaving her standing in its wake. Her lips quirked into a satisfied smile but for the first time she wondered if she was consciously making them do just that.

"You alright, Six?"

It was Kat, leaping over a corpse of her own making. Six turned toward her as though suddenly woken from a deep sleep. "Of course I am," she replied. "You said we need to take the elevator to regroup with the rest of the team?"

"So I did. Come on."

There was no need to ignore the blood splattered against the glassy walls of the small alcove outside the elevator door; her gaze merely passed over the sight as though it were lambs' blood painted over a doorway and she the Angel of Death himself.

The elevator lit up as they stepped inside. Six looked down as Kat punched in for the elevator to take them up; her boots were splattered with whatever hunters were made of, but again she took no notice. She staggered backward against the wall as the building was rocked by an explosion but, other than that, she didn't move at all.

"Just what exactly was that?" said Kat into her comm. "Noble Leader?"

"_I'm telling you, the Corvette's hitting this place hard!_" The voice was Emile's. "_And I heard that about knives being a crutch by the way._"

"Hardly an appropriate occasion to remark on it! Where's our orbital support anyway? There must be something that can fire a MAC round around here."

"_Kat?_" It was Carter this time. "_Is Six with you?_"

"Define 'with,' commander?"

"_I see that she's already rubbing off on you._"

"I'm here, commander." The voice was her own but it still took Six by surprise. "Tell me what I've gotta do."

"_We need you to get up there and assist Emile,_" he instructed her as the doors slid open. Kat moved forward into what appeared to be a security office. "_We'll meet up with you along the way._"

"Welcome to the Office of Naval Intelligence," a cool female voice greeted their approach into the office interior. "Please wait as an ONI representative will meet you shortly."

"I doubt that very much," answered Kat in a disgusted tone of voice as she shoved a body off of the main desk.

The electronic greeter hummed back to life as a troupe of grunts entered the room. "Thank you, lieutenant. You are cleared for access."

Six's hands worked like clockwork as she rained down fire on the grunts. They all fell with little issue, leaving her to wonder what had been the point of sending them into combat in the first place. _That's enough. No more or you'll never going to be able to get yourself out of here. _

"Keep moving, Six," said Kat relentlessly, activating the doors and leading her into a room that seemed to go up forever and was crawling with Covenant troops of all ranks and sizes.

Six's brain clicked back onto autopilot as Carter pressed fresh ammo into her hand. "Emile needs your help now."

She nodded. "I take it that he's up those stairs."

"Yep, _all_ of those stairs." He glanced to Jorge who was just finishing up a couple of jackals. "Three, Two, stay here and hold the ground. Jorge, you'll be with me and Six."

Jorge clapped her on the back but she could barely feel it through the heavy plating. "Let's move."

The next room was a swarm of grunts and jackals; she had to hardly think about anything as she and Carter took them out. Moving fluidly like water pooling around jagged rocks in a gentle stream, she flowed around each opponent, snapping necks or shoving them down so that they hit their heads; she hardly had to use her gun at all except for a couple of headshots to the occasional jackal that refused to die. Most seemed willing enough to fall.

"Keep it up!" Carter called out, tossing a skirmisher over the railing of a bridge. "Keep moving; keep going. Six, what are you doing?"

She was shooting bullets through the doorway of the room they'd just vacated and into what must have appeared to be empty air. "Fracking elite's got camo," she snapped through gritted teeth. "And I can barely see where I'm shooting anyway in this light."

"Six, come on."

"Remember what happened last time you doubted my eyes?" She ceased her shots, trying to find the telltale glimmer of active camo.

"Well, you can bet that I do," replied Jorge with a snort. He forded the space between Carter and Six in three, easy strides. "Step back, Spartan," he commanded and then unleashed bullets that clattered like rain into the room.

There was the sound of something falling to the ground and Jorge stuck out his foot to kick at something like a corpse that shimmered against the ground like quicksilver made solid: the remains of an elite with gray armor and active camo.

Six looked to Carter and opened her mouth to say something childish along the lines of "I told you so" but an explosion suddenly shook the building and all she could do was brace herself against a wall.

"What was that?" said Jorge, crossing back over the bridge as the shaking subsided.

"_That Corvette is going to tear this place down._" It was Sword Control nagging again. Six sighed. "_What's going on over there, Noble?_"

"_Look, commander,_" And it was Emile this time, equally irritating. "_If you're expecting me to do this on my own, I can't. I need another Spartan._"

"_Commander,_" So Kat also had to choose that particular moment in time to speak up. "_The Covenant dropped off more troops ground level. They're coming up the elevator. Could use some back-up. Acknowledge?_"

Carter was slightly crouched between the railings of the bridge, recovering from the upset he'd received when the Corvette had racked the room. His voice sounded stuffy, as though he was either crying under the helmet or was suffering from a nosebleed. She put equal weight to both possibilities. "Jam the controls, Kat. Six, get up top and assist Emile. Jorge, make sure she gets there. I've gotta go back down."

"Depend on it," replied Jorge confidently. "Come along, Six. Up the stairs."

They worked well together, quickly progressing up the interior of the building, marking the place as their own with bullet holes lining the walls and enemy blood staining the upholstery. Six watched in interest as Jorge shattered glass everywhere he shot. Peering around the edge of a doorway close to the top, he jerked his head in her direction. "This one's yours, Six. I can't shoot the bastards until you get them out in the open."

Emile's voice crackled over the comm. again, more panicky this time around. "_Is somebody actually going to show up any time soon?_"

"Carter told you we're on our way!" roared Jorge over the comm. in response. "It's not our fault if there are so many damn Covenant bastards, Emile!" There was silence at the other end. He nodded to Six. "After you," Jorge said in a rather polite tone of voice.

"Make sure you watch what you shoot," she said before rushing forward onto the bridge, borrowed shotgun still in hand. "Watch the balcony, Five," she added as she crossed. "I don't know what that class that thing is but I'd like to get rid of it before it gets rid of me."

"I see it. Come on, Six. Draw the bastards out."

She did with one shot apiece to the two elites she encountered, encouraging them to take notice of her before she ran back out into the open space of the bridge. They followed, as she thought they might.

"Hit the deck, Six," Jorge called out but she did one better, sprinting forward to crouch behind her team member as he alternately pumped out shots and lobbed grenades.

"Don't break the bridge," she said playfully but was indeed careful where she stepped when she crossed again.

Following, Jorge chuckled. "Wouldn't be the first time," he admitted before they came to an intersection. "Stairs are this way, Six."

She shook her head, pausing before turning down the alternate corridor. "Not yet. I've still got business to take care of."

"You want some help, Spartan?"

"Nah, go on. Maybe Emile will stop whining if you give him a hand."

Taking off before he could say anything else, Six made way for the balcony she had seen earlier, its occupant in mind. The blade of her knife had a special affinity for exactly that kind of Covenant bastard. It had a couple of grunts guarding its position; a couple of shots of her magnum dealt with that issue. She took knife in hand and approached the Elite –_what did they call them? Oh yeah_ –Elite General.

General or not, anything went down with a knife thrust between its ribs and she kept her footsteps light as she moved across the balcony. She thought that she almost had it in the bag –one more step and her blade would find a new home –but the General turned, snarling, at the very last minute.

It wrenched the knife from her hand –did it not feel the sting of the blade in its palm? –and tossed it over the railing in one swift motion. She fumbled for her magnum, for her shotgun, for anything and idly remembered what Kat had said about knives being a crutch. Anger boiled up –that was _her _knife after all that had just clattered down past catwalks toward the atrium –and she smacked the General across the side of the head with the shotgun to little effect.

_Why did it always seem so much easier before? _She wondered incredulously as the alien shoved her back. She had to crouch into a less defensive position just to avoid being thrown off the edge. Rolling around to the left, she skirted the perimeter of the balcony, trying to get behind the assailant. At the very least, she could try snapping its neck.

She didn't need to. Jorge appeared overhead, grabbing the General by the neck and shoving it over the railing. It fell a few meters to a catwalk and Six took the opportunity to leap up with magnum in hand and headshot the bastard from above.

When it lay still, Six turned to Jorge and, slightly begrudging, said, "Thanks."

"You can't go off on your own anymore and not expect somebody to follow you," he told her without preamble. "We didn't have time for this. Come on."

She went running up the stairs before Jorge even got back to the intersection they had previously parted at. The top level was a wreck; if she'd had to watch where she stepped before, she'd need to float now to keep rubble from dropping down onto the catwalks.

"_Commander, this base isn't going to be able to withstand another salvo from that Corvette. Those Banshees have to go down._"

"_Lieutenant, we need those Longswords up in the air._" It was Carter and he sounded angry again. It also sounded as though his nose was still bleeding, if that was what it was. "_Why the hell aren't you up there already?_"

"We ran into some interference," Jorge answered as Six scrambled through rubble to a doorway.

The open air met her approach, wind rushing in through a huge hole. She stepped left and found herself practically nose to nose with the Corvette that had been causing all of the havoc. Emile glanced down from his perch up in the base's exposed skeleton and snorted. "_It's about time, newbie. Watch the Phantom._"

"I'm gonna need something stronger than a shotgun if I'm going to be anything useful," replied Six, ducking under a Banshee's fire.

"_You'll find all the firepower you'll need lying around here. Somewhere._"

"Here," Jorge tossed her a rocket launcher which she was careful to catch. "I'll take care of the elites. You get to work on those Banshees."

He disappeared into an adjoining corridor, presumably to deal with the new hostiles he mentioned, and Six searched the ground, looking for ammo. "_Are you having fun yet?_" asked Emile, taking another shot at an enemy ship.

"No," she answered sardonically, seizing up a couple of rounds.

"_Then shoot something. That always makes me smile._"

When she had all that she needed, Six planted her feet firmly against the floor, aimed high, and watched as one Banshee after another exploded in loud succession. "_You smiling yet, newbie?_"

"No," she reloaded, "but this one should do it."

The missile soared in a wide arc through the open air between Six and the Corvette and the last Banshee burst into flame like an imploding sun. She watched it fall slowly through the air like a falling star too close for comfort and envied Emile for the better view.

"_Clear,_" Emile called out over the comm. The skull on his helmet grinned down at Six as he turned toward her. "_That's how we get things done around here, newbie,_" he told her, leaping down the wreckage to land cat-like beside her. "Clear!" he said again and together they listened as Sword Control responded.

"_Noble Team, Longswords inbound and ready to push. Orbital defense prepped for the shot._"

"Should be a good show."

She hardly heard Emile, watching in silence as Longswords swooped down to pursue the fleeing Corvette like daggers. She wondered what had happened to her knife as the twin ships broke off, plunging away from the enemy cruiser as a single MAC round fell down from the sky like some avenging angel's arrow, penetrating the Corvette in a clean shot. They watched as it fell through the otherwise empty air, engines flickering and then dying before their eyes.

"Beautiful, ain't it?" Jorge moved forward from behind, pulling off his helmet as he walked. Six glanced over her shoulder at his approach. "Somebody ought to paint a picture."

"No time for that," said Emile as the ship broke through the surface of the lake. "But I guess they could make an underwater museum of that thing. Or something. Never mind; this is ONI turf."

"They'll probably want to excavate it," said Six with a shrug.

"Nice work, by the way," added Jorge, turning to her. "Even with that General."

She waited for Emile to move away back into the ruined base before she said, "Don't… mention it to the commander. I don't want another lecture about lone wolves."

He chuckled. "Carter likes his metaphors. Nah, it's alright. I didn't mean to get short with you either, Spartan. You've just gotta understand… we don't want you to go out there risking your life alone, Carter especially these days. There's a time for that but when you're working as a team –or are supposed to be anyway –that's not the time, alright? You understand?"

"I aim to please," she repeated the earlier sentiment with a shrug. "If that's what you all want…"

"That's not it either," he said with a shake of his head.

"_Five, Six,_" It was Carter and he sounded strained this time around. "_We need you down at the science wing. Dr. Halsey wants a debrief and Command's saying we're all hers._"

A crease crossed Jorge's brow. "Repeat? Did you say Halsey wants us?"

"_I did. Can you both come down?_"

"Copy that. We're on our way." He shut off the comm. and shook his head. "I don't need Command to tell me that."

"What do you mean?" asked Six as they started to walk back from the view.

"Been hers half my life," replied Jorge with grim satisfaction. She paused in the doorway, evaluating this new development. He glanced back at her with a smile. "Come on now. We wouldn't want you getting left behind."


	8. Glass Houses

**Winterbirth**

_A Halo Reach Fan Fiction by Marianne Bennet_

**A/N**: I had to do research into Halsey and Jorge and the Spartan II program to pull this chapter together. There I discovered that Halsey makes a point of calling Spartans by name rather than number. Good luck with that, Six. Thank you's to my reviewers and beta-reader EternalEntity. That's all. Enjoy!

**Eight: Glass Houses**

_July 26__th__, 2552 _

The air conditioning in Sword Base had taken a hit. Six watched a bead of sweat roll down Jorge's forehead as they walked through ruined corridors toward the science wing and decided that that would be her excuse for keeping her temperature-regulated helmet on in front of Dr. Halsey.

"'Been hers?'" she repeated as they stepped aside to let a medic rush past. "What do you mean by that?"

"It's funny," said Jorge slowly, taking the initiative to continue their progress through the base's shell. "You ask everyone on the team these very personal questions and then you shut us down whenever anybody makes a single remark about you."

"Sorry," Six replied, keeping her tone indifferent. "I don't mean to… shut you down or… jump down your throats or something. I'm just not too keen on anybody studying up my personal history."

"Don't worry about it. I'm sure you're no worse than, say, Jun was when he first showed up. Don't even get me started on Emile. And I imagine I must've been a bit of a handful for Carter when he first made commander," he added thoughtfully. "Don't worry about it. I take it you know the doctor too."

"We've met on occasion," she answered shortly, very conscious of the fact that she was reaffirming Jorge's point with her response. "Never under the best of circumstances and I'm sure this is no exception."

"I'm not sure how things could get worse. Covenant on Reach and not only that: we don't know where they are or how many are on the planet. We don't even know how the hell they got here in the first place. And now they're attacking ONI sites that are _supposed _to be somewhat of a secret. This is bad, Six. If Halsey's involved, that means it may be worse than we think."

"Ah, shit, Jorge, Halsey involves herself whenever the Covenant comes up," replied Six lightly as they paused again to allow three stretchers pass. "Maybe it's a good thing that she gets to see up close what we have to deal with every day."

Jorge shot her an odd look. "Halsey's seen plenty of action herself," he told her.

"But–" Six paused, trying to remember something she'd read. "That's right. You're a Spartan II, aren't you? You're one of the ones that–"

"One of the 'Lost Kids,' right?" he finished wryly. She said nothing in return. "Look, Six: I was six years old when they found me on a street in Palhaza and I was already lost. They didn't even need a flash clone to cover up my disappearance because nobody was about to come looking. And I survived, see? Maybe even turned out better in the end. Come on. We better not keep the doctor waiting."

"Not to mention the commander."

"You and Carter just really don't get along, don't you?"

She shrugged. "We cramp each other's style," she suggested. "And I've known people like him and he's known people like me and it didn't take much for either of us to figure out that we weren't about to become each other's favorite person. Which is okay. What matters is that he's got my back when it comes to a fight and I'll have his."

Jorge considered this and opened his mouth as though about to respond when they were interrupted:

"You're forgetting, commander, that _I_ was the one who requested _your_ assistance in this matter." Six rolled her eyes. Dr. Catherine Halsey was in one of her _moods _and her voice subsequently carried down the hallway. "I am perfectly aware of what has happens on my very own doorstep. What I actually called you here for was a more detailed account of your team's previous engagement at Visegrad…"

She cut herself off mid-sentence as Six and Jorge entered the vicinity. Her eyes met his through the transparent blue barrier that divided civilians from Spartans. "Jorge," said Halsey in a much softer, more curious tone. "It's been too long."

Six glanced to Jorge and was surprised to see the big man smile almost in… appreciation, maybe, of the doctor's mere acknowledgment of his presence. "Ma'am."

Halsey's eyes broke from the older Spartan's face and glanced down at the rest of him. "And what have you done here with my old armor?"

"Just some… additions I've made."

Six shook her head, more in amusement than disapproval, murmuring, "What have you done now," not quite under her breath and then Halsey's gaze flicked to her. "And I see that Jennifer hasn't managed to break away from you all to start her own mission of choice. Yet."

She immediately stiffened at the sound. Halsey didn't frighten Six nor did she awe the younger woman in any way, shape, or fashion. Perhaps the doctor's intelligence was something to be envied but Six was sure that Halsey was privy to secrets that she wouldn't be able to stomach. Every gift came with a price. She wondered exactly when and how Dr. Halsey had paid up.

As for the barb, she paid it little mind besides a reproachful "Ma'am." She had nothing to prove to this woman as she might to the members of Noble Team. Besides, if you walked into a room and Halsey did nothing to acknowledge your presence, that was when you knew you were doing something wrong.

The corner of Halsey's mouth quirked upward in amusement. "Good to see you both," she said and then turned back to Carter. "Now, as to the matter of the Visegrad Relay–"

"You have our report," was Carter's immediate response. Emile and Jun exchanged glances in the corner of the room as Kat paced beside her commander. Jorge continued to stand at attention though Six shifted her weight from one foot to the other, uneasy. Tension seemed more tangible when she was not in the thick of it.

Halsey frowned. "I'm afraid there's a bit more to the story than what you detailed, commander. Visegrad's data center was home to one of my xeno-archeologists," Six's toes curled at the phrase, "Professor Laszlo Sorvad. Perhaps you could… shed some light on his recent demise."

"If he was a civilian male in his late-sixties, he died with a Covenant energy sword thrust through his abdomen."

"Elites then." She seemed to perk up at this development rather than display sorrow for her colleague's end.

"Lots and lots of Elites," muttered Emile under his breath as Jorge replied, "They engaged us as well. It was just… uh, well it was just after we found your scientist's daughter, ma'am. Sarah -that was her name –she was hiding under the–"

"Irrelevant," Halsey immediately deemed this information. With a slight motion of her hand, she dismissed Sarah and everything to do with her. Six's fists tightened. "The Elites; tell me more about them."

Jorge seemed resigned to the doctor's attitude as he answered, "Three, Zealot class. One got by us, looked like the leader."

"Zealots?" That had definitely captured her attention. She fixed her gaze on Jorge and Six thought she saw Carter tense in response. "You're certain?"

"Their armor configuration matched up."

Halsey looked to Six again as though asking, no, _demanding_ a second opinion. She shrugged before putting in her two cents: "Shield strength too."

"I gave the order not to pursue." Carter stepped forward, partially obstructing Six's view of the doctor. "Our primary objective was to get the relay back online."

Though she could only see half of Halsey's face, Six recognized the expression the woman was wearing. She could have warned Carter, probably should have, as Halsey repeated, "Your primary objective? Commander, are you a puppet or a Spartan?"

There was a perceptible albeit silent reaction amongst Noble Team. Kat stopped pacing. Jun looked up with a discernible frown. Even while still seated, Emile's body language became positively murderous. For her part, as Jorge became rigid beside her, Six smirked to herself. _And here's where he bends, _she thought to herself, almost smug. _For all of his talk of being a leader, here's where he'll bend._

Carter stood still. "Ma'am?"

Halsey sighed. "There are those at ONI, myself included, who believe the Covenant dispatch Elite advance teams to hunt down artifacts of value to their religion. Survivor accounts suggest such teams are small, nimble, and almost always Zealot-class. No doubt they came to the station for the abundance of ONI excavation data stored there." She paused. "And you let them get away."

"Data retrieval was not a command objective," replied Carter stubbornly. "You can take it up with the Colonel if you have issue with that. Even had we known, we had other, more urgent matters to attend to."

"Like warning the planet," put in Kat, moving to stand beside her commander.

"Professor Sorvad's final entry in his field notes makes reference to a 'latchkey' discovery," continued Halsey as though neither had spoken. "Latchkey… that isn't a word he would use lightly. So," she adopted a brisk tone and looked to Kat, "let's hope that the data module your Lieutenant Commander stole contains record of it."

"Kat," he sighed, more exhausted than exasperated; perhaps this was some sort of typical occurrence with her to which he had already become accustomed.

The lieutenant commander in question shot Carter a look as she retrieved the module from one of her belt's compartments. He jerked his head in the direction of a transfer container in the shield door as Halsey said, "Before you ask, I was alerted the moment you attempted to access its contents, as I would be with any unauthorized tap."

Over the audible clatter as Kat dropped the module and the slam of the container against the shield door as Halsey pulled it to her side, she added, "You should know that that data is classified Tier One. I could have you sent to the brig for interfering in my work."

"Maybe you'd like to join her."

That caught Six's attention if nothing else did. Across the room, Emile's helmeted head jerked up from where it had been lulling against his shoulder. Jun's face was an impressive blank but Kat glanced to Carter with an expression between a smirk and a smile.

Halsey kept her expression as carefully schooled as Jun did. "I didn't quite catch that, commander. What exactly are you suggesting?"

"We're currently under emergency planetary directive," Carter told her in tones of quiet conviction, "Winter Contingency. I'm sure that you're familiar with the consequences of civilian interference with a Spartan deployment."

She stood very still, the module still clasped in her suspended hand. "Are you threatening me, commander?"

With a shrug, Carter replied evenly, "I'm just making a reading suggestion, ma'am." Turning his back on the doctor, he said to the rest of his team, "Come on. We're bunking down here for the night. We'll figure out what Holland wants in the morning. Let's move."

The rest of the team filed out of the science wing in quiet succession but Jorge lingered and Six provided silent company. The two of them hung back for a few quiet moments and Six examined the expression on Jorge's face as he stood beside her, still looking to Halsey: hope, dejection, disappointment, relief, resignation, something else. She wondered at how she was able to discern others' moods and motives and yet at the same time despised those same emotions when they painted their own picture on her.

Halsey didn't look up from the data module and Jorge did not appear to have ever expected that she would. He bowed his head slightly, said, "Ma'am," and then waited one more moment.

"That will be all, Jorge," she said, still fixed on that tiny data chip and all it could possibly contain and mean, and then the older Spartan bowed his head again, touched Six's shoulder, and led the way out of the blue lit room.

…

Emile clapped Carter on the back as soon as Jorge had excused himself from the room Noble Team had appropriated for their use. "Nice one, commander."

Carter winced. "It'll come back to bite us in the ass eventually."

"Well, yeah, sure, eventually she'll find some way to make us all miserable. But in the meantime, you definitely took her on."

"You guys don't like Halsey," observed Six from where she sat, leaning against the wall as she tried to buff out a scuff mark on her armor's kneepad. Her red scout helmet was on the ground beside her but she didn't seem to care. No one was paying attention to her anyway.

"Halsey's…" Carter sounded as though he was trying to be diplomatic as he pulled out a chair and sat down. "Halsey can sometimes be a bit of a piece of work."

"Halsey's a bitch," said Emile, not quite under his breath.

"Don't let Jorge hear you say that," said Jun, half-perched on the edge of a table.

Six glanced up from her current task, amused. "What if he says it first?"

There was a pitcher of water and cups on the table next to Jun. "Don't wait for that to happen," said Carter as he reached for a glass. "It might be a while."

The door slid open and Kat entered. Like the rest of them, she had not yet removed her Spartan armor. "Commander," she began but Carter beat her to the punch.

"Kat, you've gotta stop trying to hack all of the devices we pick up. It makes things complicated in the long run, especially when they're not really ours to fool around with."

"But in the short run, commander," said Kat in return, "it gives us insight into what exactly we're dealing with. I think it's useful."

"Then you step up and tell Halsey just that next time."

"I thought you were handling it just fine."

"See, commander?"

They both ignored Emile's interjection; Six had the feeling they did that a lot. Carter grinned. "What was in that module anyway?"

She shrugged artlessly. "I didn't get through all of the necessary decryption by the time we had to hand it over to the doctor so I don't have any idea, to be honest. But you could tell that Halsey was worried that I _had _broken through which means it has to be something important. It's interesting that she used the word 'latchkey.'"

"Important, interesting, but we really have no idea," Jun condensed in a thoughtful tone of voice. "That's–"

"Useless," said Emile.

Six chose not to input her opinion into the conversation and simultaneously determined that the scuff marks weren't going to come out any time soon so she should give up on polishing them out altogether. Pretty soon, Kat said something about a shower and Jun said something about wondering where Jorge had gone and the two of them disappeared down different corridors.

Emile pulled off his helmet and crumpled into the seat beside Carter. "You written your report yet, commander?"

"If you've got something specific you want me to include, you're in luck. I haven't even started."

"Ah, nothing in particular; just the customary mention of my general badass-ery. You and Jorge sure took your time getting up top, newbie."

"We ran into an elite general with a fuel rod gun," replied Six evenly, crossing the room to get her own glass of water. "Had to stop and take care of him."

"Hope you gave him hell."

"I think he's down there right now," was her cool response. She looked to Carter. "We left a Wraith outside the gate. I don't know if that requires mentioning."

"If you left it there, they probably found it," said Carter wearily. "The Covenant's been driven off from Sword Base or what's left of it anyway."

"Where are we going in the morning, Carter?"

"Why does everyone ask me that? I have no clue; it all depends on where we're needed and where Holland wants us." Suddenly, he looked up at Six and smiled. "Did you happen to lose anything while you were up there with Jorge, Six?"

Her eyes narrowed slightly, wondering what he was getting at. "My knife fell down the catwalks while we were fighting the elite general. I tried to look for it but I didn't…" Six's voice tapered off when she saw that Carter was withdrawing something from his belt.

"That's because it had already been found," he replied a little smugly as he placed the blade in question on the table between them.

She reached for it and when she felt its familiar weight in her hand, she said, "Thank you."

"Jun's the one that actually found it down at the Atrium," Carter clarified, seeming to be suddenly self-conscious.

"But you're the one that's returning it," she countered. "So, thank you."

He smiled again. "You're giving credit where credit's not necessarily due."

"So you should be ever the more gracious," she said in return, now also smiling.

"You still hate me, Six?"

Remembering exactly what she had told him earlier that day and realizing that Emile was watching all of this with a crooked smile all with a start, Six looked away first. "Um, right," she said quickly. "Your report…"

"Needs doing," he agreed. "And I'm going to go and… get changed."

Emile watched and Six stared down at her knife as Carter hastily rose from his seat and vanished down a hallway without looking back once. "I thought you said just this morning that you hated the commander," he drawled.

"Where'd you hear that?"

"It gets around." When she said nothing immediately in response to that, he sighed. "Look, newbie, I know it's your third day on the job here but take a little advice. There's a difference between hating your superior because he's your superior and makes mistakes and hating your superior because he's a person and makes mistakes. What Jorge has been too nice to tell you is that Carter hasn't really done anything to deserve being hated on either account."

"Funny of you to say that," she replied curtly. "He mentioned that you might've said the same thing about him at one point in time."

"Might've," Emile acknowledged with a shrug. "But I say I hate all my superiors because they can order me around. There's another difference. Look, Carter's a good guy when you shove aside all his stupid ideas about leadership and its responsibilities."

"He took on Halsey," Six conceded begrudgingly. "Have to admire him for that."

"He doesn't take crap from people for very long before he decides he's had enough." Emile got up and stretched. "Maybe you should think about that. Night, newbie."

Six watched him go. It took a few moments for her to realize that this time it was she that was sitting alone in an empty room and very much in the dark.


	9. Bird in Hand

**Winterbirth**

_A Halo Reach Fan Fiction by Marianne Bennet_

**A/N**: Another very fun chapter to write. I'm beginning to hear the characters' (in particular now Emile's) voices distinctly which is sometimes a relief and sometimes a distraction. But mostly the former. :) Thank you to my readers and my beta-reader, EternalEntity. Enjoy!

**Nine: Bird in Hand**

_July 30__th__, 2552 _

"It's quiet."

"_Too quiet_," said Emile in response to her observation and Six thought he was joking. "_Don't get too comfortable, newbie._"

"I don't think I'm ever 'comfortable,'" she replied, scanning the northern horizon as she spoke.

"_You and me both, newbie. Radar checks out clean this side._"

"Same here. When are you going to stop calling me that?"

"_When you stop acting like one._" He paused, maybe considering this, maybe falling asleep, Six couldn't say. "_Or whenever the next one shows up._" She heard him sigh over the comm. "_I'm bored._"

She traced the mountains to the east with her gaze, imagining the dawn rolling in like thunder no one could hear. "What do you want me to do about it?"

"_Entertain me. Surely you have a story._"

"Why would you think I have any stories worth telling?"

"_Everybody has a story._" He paused. "_Jorge always has stories._"

"I'm not Jorge; haven't you noticed?"

"_Maybe if you bothered to take that helmet off more often, I would bother noticing._"

"You're one to talk."

"_Sure I am._"

"Don't be a hypocrite."

"_Make me._"

Something caught her eye down along the rocky beach. It was really too far away to be anything worth looking at but Six squinted through her scope anyway. "Is this your idea of entertainment?" she asked as she adjusted the magnification with a flick of her thumb. "Bullying stories out of people?"

"_Are you calling me a bully?_"

"Yes, I think I am." She lined up the reticle with what looked like a smooth rock half-drowned by the tide and watched as it was repeatedly swallowed by each incoming wave.

"_You better watch it, newbie, or I might have to come over there and show you how much of a bully I can be._"

"That's alright. I don't want to trouble you," she replied contentedly and then sat down at the edge of the sandy cliff and watched the waves break on the shore. If she were a child or some naiad of another nature, she might run out into them. More likely, she would be another Hecuba, running out to drown herself among the waves rather than suffer another, more personal defeat. But Reach wasn't Troy, the Covenant wasn't about to come up to the gates in a wooden horse, and there were no beautiful women to fight over.

"_You picking up anything over there?_"

She sighed. "I almost wish. Now I'm bored. How about _you_ tell _me_ a story?"

"_You wouldn't like my stories._"

"Why do you say that?"

"_You're a girl. My stories are all about dead… cats and other… cute things._"

"Oh, so now you notice?"

He chuckled. "_I don't know why you cared so much about _my _noticing. Seems to me the big man noticed a long time ago._"

"You think cats are cute?" she asked, determinedly ignoring the latter part of his sentence, sure that he was teasing her and resolute that she would not rise to the bait.

"_Uh, I guess. Maybe. Don't you?_"

Shaking her head even though he couldn't see the gesture, she disagreed: "Cats are evil. And I know that I'm not the only girl who thinks that, so why would you assume I wouldn't appreciate your story?"

"_Well, Kat never does._"

"The _name_, Emile."

"_Right,_" she could hear his grin. "_Gotcha._"

She sighed and lifted her scope to her gaze again, idly wondering if she was still sharp enough to take the measure of the tide. She looked to her previous mark, that tall, smooth stone and then let her gun fall back down toward her lap, blinking twice before lifting her magnum up again. How could she have missed for a moment…?

Heart racing but never taking her eyes off of the "rock," she called out over her shoulder, "Emile."

"_What is it now, newbie?_"

"There's something… ah shit." Capsules were descending onto the beach from above, a Phantom flickered to life in the air above the shoreline. She quickly got to her feet. "We're in trouble."

"Ah, shit," he echoed her previous sentiment as he bounded forward at a sprint into the vicinity. "Shit, shit, shit, shit," she heard him count out a beat as he took off into the temporary compound Noble Team was operating out of.

Six took stock of the enemy: Elites, skirmishers, jackals here and there. It was a large unit built for speed; they'd make short work of coming up the cliffs. Emile was rousing the rest of the team; it was only a few moments before all of the lights in the complex went dark. She had only just turned on her night vision when Jun emerged into the open, fully suited though still tightening a strap on one of his shoulders.

"Are they coming up the cliff yet?" he asked intently, studying the enemy party as they congregated on the shore.

"They didn't come for us; they're only a scouting party, I think," she replied. "I don't think they've seen us yet."

"They will," Jun responded with grim certainty. "And, when they do, they'll come. Let's get back inside. We need to take care of a few things before we set out."

"Are we taking the Falcon?" she asked as they stepped back inside the complex and made their way into the main room. "It would be faster by a lot."

"And get shot down by that Phantom?" said Kat from where she stood at the control panel, pulling up a set of coordinates.

"We might be able to slip out unnoticed."

"I prefer the bird in hand," said Carter, following Kat's thinking. "There's no time to airlift anything out of here, not the base and not us either. Kat, get me through to Holland and then fry the database. Noble Team's not about to be a security leak any time soon. Jun, go back outside and keep us posted. Six, start packing up the essentials. Jorge, Emile, you guys take care of the Falcon and then help Six load up the Hogs. We'll head into the mountains and request airlift once our position's secure."

Noble Team seemed to move like a hurricane around Six as they moved like clockwork in their various tasks. She had no idea what "the essentials" meant; she supposed that in the heat of the moment, Carter had forgotten she was a relative newcomer to Noble's style. That was alright, she guessed; better that than think Six to be incompetent altogether.

Suddenly grateful that Noble was to head out to a new location in the morning anyway and so consequently everyone had already packed up their duffels, Six swooped down on each cell-like room and swiped a bag from each bunk before backtracking through the compound to the modest garage. The comm. chatter buzzed in her ear as she ran:

"_Commander, they've started up the cliffs._"

"_Is it because they've spotted us or because that's what they were going to do anyway?_"

Jun took a moment to evaluate this. "_I'm not sure, commander. They aren't pointing any fingers in our direction. Do you need more time? Do you want me to see if I can divert them?_"

"_Four, Five, how much damage have you done to that Falcon?_"

"_Not enough,_" was Emile's response. "_We took care of the controls but it isn't anything that Kat couldn't fix in a hurry. But there's still that Phantom._"

"_I didn't forget it. Six, where are you?_"

"In the garage, commander," she answered as she dumped her load into the Warthogs, shoving the bags underneath seats, "like you told me to be."

"_I remember what I did five minutes ago, thanks._" She rolled her eyes at his response. "_Are we loaded up?_"

"Negative, commander; I've still got to go back for weapons."

"_Don't mind the weapons, Six. Kat and I will grab them on our way up._" He paused and Six heard Kat tell him something in a muted voice. "_Listen up, team: Holland's gonna set us up a rendezvous point a few miles up into the mountains but we've gotta get there first. Kat, Jun, Emile, you guys take the fist Hog. Six, Jorge, and I got the second._"

"_Commander…_"

"_Kat's driving, Four._" She heard Emile sigh. "_Everyone in the garage. Now._"

"_They're coming up the hill now._"

"_Leave them be, Jun. Alright, team, let's load up._"

The first to enter the garage were Jorge and Emile, both fully suited and both emanating anticipation. Six couldn't blame them; there was no better high than the thrill of chase, of time running out. Jorge announced his arrival by unbolted the gun from the leftmost Warthog and replacing it with his own. Dusting off his gloved hands, he nodded to Six. "The commander and the rest are on their way?"

She shrugged and moved to slap the controls to open the garage door. "They'd better be. I'm exhausted and I'm not really in any shape to drive."

"I thought Spartans were supposed to be ready for _anything_," Emile snorted.

"Oh, I'll drive," Six replied dismissively. "It's only that your chances of surviving the night would plummet."

"_Carter…_"

"What is it now, Jun?" Carter's voice took her by surprise as he hurried into the garage, helmet in one hand and two fresh DMRs in the other. He tossed one to Six who immediately holstered her magnum.

"_Enemy's coming up the hill now. Acknowledge?_"

"I thought I told you to get inside but thanks for the head's up. Get over here now, Three. Kat?" He looked around the room as though expecting her to enter at any moment.

She did, arms full of grenades and an assault rifle. Jun was quick to follow, running past her, breathless. "We need to go _now_," he said, gaze intent on his commander.

"Right," Carter took a deep breath. The impending attack seemed to have the opposite effect on him rather than the constant rush in Six's heart. He looked pale rather than excited but alert all the same. "Kat, get behind the wheel now. Emile, Jun, you're with her. The coordinates are in your suit. Go now. We're right behind you."

Emile leapt up, bracing the soles of his boots against the built in turret. Jun and Kat jumped in and then the latter powered up the engine. Carter came around the hood of the Hog, moving close to where Kat sat behind the wheel. She looked up at him and Six imagined with an unexpected pang that she was smiling. "Stay close, commander," was what she told him before she pressed her foot to the gas and half of Noble Team disappeared into the darkness.

Carter watched as the outline of the Warthog disappeared and then still stood there some, still watching. She watched him watching the mist, the mysterious pang still growing until it seemed to nearly swallow her like the curve of a wave closing in. But, as soon as the swell threatened to crash overhead, Six caught herself. "What are you doing?" she asked him, calling out into the minute hum of the silence. "They're still coming up that hill and they're not about to wait for us to get away."

Jorge clambered onto the back of the vehicle and Six leapt into the passenger seat as Carter slammed shut the driver's door. His eyes had still not quite lost that look like glass frosted over as he pulled his helmet over his head. "Let's get out of here," said Jorge and then Carter turned on the engine, pressed his foot down, and Six felt darkness tangible envelop them all.

…

When she felt her eyelids grow heavy, she leaned forward and studied the decal on the DMR in her lap. When she deemed that there was too much blood swishing around her skull, she tipped her head back and gazed at the sky. She went through this process several times before Carter commented on it.

"Are you alright over there, Six?" he asked, glancing up from the path that Kat's Warthog had cut through the underbrush.

Her vision was getting kind of blurry as she turned to look at him. "Falling asleep over here, commander, but it's nothing I can't handle. I think Jorge gave up though," she added, jerking her head in the direction of where Jorge sat in the back of the Hog, leaning up against the front seats with his back to his commander and Six.

"_Who can blame him?_" grumbled Emile over the comm. "_The two of us get on the guns and suddenly there's nothing to shoot at._"

"_Already itching for some action, Emile, Six?_" inquired Jun, sounding amused. "_I would have thought that yesterday's raid would have tided you over for the time being_."

"_They only tide me over until the next one,_" was Emile's sardonic reply.

Six slid forward in her seat until her neck lulled against the headrest. "I'm not itching for a fight," she said irritably. "I just want to do _something _that'll keep me awake."

The brush that surrounded them was low lying, shrub-like, bristly, the ground sandy. The terrain wouldn't provide much cover in a fight but the sight of it made her wonder if the air around them was warm. Experimenting, she tipped her head forward and let her helmet slid into her hands.

Emile said something and then something else but his voice was muffled by the sound of the wind; there was nothing else but the rush in her ears. She relished the oblivion until Carter looked to her, said, "She's taken off her helmet; that's the reason," and then said to her, "What do you think you're doing."

"Breathing," she answered.

"Can't you breathe through the helmet? So I don't have to worry about you getting shot by something?"

"So you do care."

"Yes, I–" he shot her a look through his helmet's visor. "I thought I made that clear."

"_We're hearing, like, half a conversation over here, commander,_" said Emile in a loud but equally dry voice.

"We're miles away from where we left the Covenant on the beach," said Six, ignoring Emile's interjection. "We've been driving for what, two hours? By the way, are we going to run out of fuel any time soon?"

"Unlikely," answered Carter, momentarily diverted. "Holland was very clear that fuel would not be an issue in getting to the rendezvous point. Besides, judging on the distance we've already gone, we should be coming up on it soon. Now, is there an actual problem with your helmet or are you doing this just to annoy me?"

"Oh, I should think a little bit of both," she replied carelessly. "But why are you asking? You might not like the answer."

"I like to be sure of things."

"So I've seen."

"Have you been watching?"

She didn't respond at first but then Six said, "I watch you as much as you watch me."

He didn't seem to have anything to say to that, seemed to have been put on the spot as much by her response as she had by his question. Finally, he looked straight ahead, not sidelong at her as he had before, and asked, "Kat, how close are we anyway?"

"_I'm pulling up to the coordinates the colonel sent us right now but there's no one here. We might be early; we made better time than I'd expected. Or they might be late._"

"_Can't discount that,_" input Jun.

Carter pulled up at the edge of a copse of trees, pulling up alongside their doppelganger as Kat leapt out of the vehicle, careful to keep her back to the arriving party. Idly as she exited the passenger seat, Six realized that Noble Two had not spoken at all during the entire ride until Carter specifically asked her a question; given the experience of the past few days, she was able to identify this as atypical Kat behavior. But there was little time to muse over that as Jorge dropped down beside her and Carter started for the trees.

"Looks like it might rain," Noble's leader noted as he scanned the area with both his gaze and radar. "Trees should provide some shelter."

"How long will we be out here?" asked Jun, passing by Kat to stand beside Carter and squint through his sniper rifle through the trees.

Kat moved with a silent step through the grove, patrolling the perimeter. Responding to Jun's question, she said, "Hopefully not too long. I hate sleeping out in the open."

Privately, Six disagreed. There was a security in sleeping in a place where one's back could not easily be pressed back against a wall, where there was always somewhere to run to, where, if one was alone, one could be sure of just whose step it was that crinkled the undergrowth.

Laying his gun to rest beside an elder tree, Jorge said, "Do you want me to activate the beacon or do you think we're still too close?"

"We covered a lot of ground," was Carter's answer. "If those hostiles are going to find us tonight, the beacon won't have been the deciding factor. They'd have had to have followed us out here and I don't think they did."

"Highly unlikely," Kat was quick to agree. "Who has first watch?"

"Let's be realistic," said Emile in condescending tones. "Is anyone actually going to try and sleep out here?"

"Do all of you have issues with sleeping outside?" asked Six.

"It's not an _issue_," said Emile, offended. "It's an _aversion_. I grew up in a city, okay?"

"No one is going to sleep," Carter laid down the rule. "We have to be ready to go as soon as they arrive. No questions; we're all staying awake."

Six set her helmet down beside her on a felled tree trunk and perched her left foot upon her right knee, stretching out her hamstring. Around her, the other members of Noble Team settled into similar positions, leaning against trees and the like. She told herself that she was pleased to see that they maintained a distance from her; she liked the solitude and the silence. And then Noble Leader had show up and ruin everything:

"You need to put your helmet back on," he said as he crossed the copse to stand before her. "This isn't the rec room. We're still in the field."

"Field looks pretty clear to me."

"Why do you do this?" he suddenly wanted to know. "If everyone else is taking off their helmets, you insist on wearing yours. When everyone is all suited up –as they should be at a time like this, –you persist on doing the opposite."

"If you're going to give me a lecture," she told him, planting both feet on the ground again and leaning forward, doing her best to look him in the eye, "you might want to take off your own helmet; give the more obedient members of your team a break."

"I can't do that. I'm the commander; unlike you, I am aware of my responsibilities."

"And how's that doing for you?" He did not answer at first; she smiled and gave it time to sink in. "Why not take a break, give something else a chance to work?"

"There are times and places for breaks and this is neither, Six."

"Are you going to order me to put my helmet on now, Carter? Why can't we just… see eye to eye and… agree to disagree?"

"That isn't seeing 'eye to eye,' Jennifer."

That stopped her dead in her tracks as she felt something between her throat and lungs tighten. "That's going too far."

He folded his arms. "Your commander calling you by your name is not 'going too far'… Jennifer."

Rubbing her palms against the plating on her knees, she looked away through the trees and then back to him. "If we're going to have this discussion, can you at least take off the damn helmet with the damn comm. so we at least have the illusion of privacy?"

For a moment, she thought he was going to let it go, walk away, pretend nothing had happened, pretend that he didn't have to level with her, that he was above that, above all of it. But then she felt like their eyes finally met through his visor and then he sat down beside her on the fallen log and pulled off the helmet.

They sat in silence for a few moments; she felt the weight of him beside her, and then she said, "You didn't have to do that."

"Looks like I did."

"No, you didn't."

"Well, I did anyway so stop arguing."

She let her gaze drift along the ground, lingering on how his boots fell beside hers on the forest floor, and then she looked up, "The… moon sure is pretty."

"Yeah," he hesitated. "Yeah, I guess it is."

Letting her feet sway slightly to hit the trunk in quiet rhythm, she couldn't resist mentioning, "I bet you couldn't see that with the helmet on."

"Drop it."

"Alright," she said because there suddenly seemed to be no other word in her vocabulary. She didn't know where to go from this; this eventuality hadn't played into Six's plans. So she waited rather than instigate anything else.

Finally, Carter said, "I guess what I've been trying to get at is that… I feel sometimes like I –that we all have been bending over backwards trying to understand you since Day One but you won't give me –us –the time of day."

"If you'd been trying to understand me, you'd have taken off that helmet a while back."

"But that's me coming all of the way to you. I can't do that; no one can do that. I'm asking you to meet me in the middle."

"You can't wear a helmet half on half off, Carter."

"Yeah, well maybe you can if you're smart enough about it," he said.

Again, Six didn't seem to have anything to say to that until: "Look, I didn't–"

"Didn't what? Didn't realize that you had that effect on people?"

It nearly killed Six to say this but: "I didn't realize that I had any effect on you."

"Yeah, well," he said again and then hesitated. "Well, maybe you do."

He was smiling at her, tentatively, but she was already getting up and saying that she had to go. Her helmet was already in her hand when her feet touched the ground and she immediately started walking as soon as she'd found her legs again but every step seemed to make the distance behind her seem shorter. So she walked faster. She had already figured out that lightning can only strike you twice when you're stupid enough to stick around for the encore.


	10. Trump

**Winterbirth**

_A Halo Reach Fan Fiction by Marianne Bennet_

**A/N**: Another fun chapter (what am I saying? they're all fun to write; that's why I do this). Well, this is probably one of my favorites yet. Jorge and Jun were particularly enjoyable voices. Thank you to my readers and my beta-reader, EternalEntity. That's all. Enjoy!

**Ten: Trump**

_August 10__th__, 2552 _

Jorge was shuffling a pack of cards when Six entered the rec room while Jun and Kat conferred quietly in the background. Six's gaze darted between the three present members of Noble Team. "Are we," she yawned, "waiting up for Carter and Emile?"

Kat shrugged at the question. "They've just finished their recon trek. I'm just waiting for their debrief. Jun," she looked to her fellow Spartans, "was up anyway and Jorge…?"

"Couldn't sleep," the big man clarified, dealing out the deck to empty chairs. Casually flicking a card across the table –the Ace of Diamonds, it was revealed to be –, he added, "Did they make contact with the enemy at all, Kat?"

"Recon only," she answered firmly and Jun lifted his eyebrows in response. "I follow my orders… sometimes."

_Always, _thought Six wryly to herself as she took a seat opposite Jorge. _That is, always when it's Carter who's giving the directive._ Aloud, she replied, "Did they find anything… interesting?"

"Nothing that we didn't find the night before," answered Jorge, a crease between his eyebrows as he contemplated setting down the Queen of Hearts. Six thought it rather sad that he had set a game up only to play himself but did not voice her opinion. She didn't want to get roped into a match any more than Jun or Kat seemed to. "Looks like you and Jun will have to go in even deeper."

"Since we don't know yet what the other teams found tonight, then yes," confirmed Kat, commencing her typical pacing about the room's perimeter.

Jun looked doubtful. "None of the other teams are Spartan deployments," he said, putting new information into the picture. "It's doubtful that they discovered anything we didn't already know."

"I think you underestimate them," said Jorge.

"It's not a question of that," replied Jun reasonably. "It's only that no one goes deeper than Spartans."

With an amicable shrug, Jorge conceded the argument. As Jun turned back to polishing his sniper rifle and Kat sat down at a separate table to mull over a couple of data tables and maps, Six said to the other male Spartan, "I never figured you for a card player."

"I'm not too shabby," he replied wryly. "What about you? I'd guess that you'd have the best poker face of all, given that you and your helmet are joined at the, uh, neck."

"I'd think that Emile would have the upper hand, what with what he's got on his EVA." She felt a sardonic smile tug at the corner of her mouth. "You know how they say you play the hand across from you? Imagine staring across the table at Emile's artwork for an entire game. How long has he had that, by the way?"

"It's a… relatively recent acquisition," answered Jorge thoughtfully. "He and that skull weren't a package deal when he was transferred to Noble, if that's what you're asking. He wore a regular old EVA helmet when I first met him. A couple of weeks into the term, he comes downstairs and there it is."

"You mean he did all that in a night?"

"In a shift, actually," Jun spoke up. "He and I had the middle watch that night. He didn't even mention it to me once and we all know how much Emile likes to talk."

"So he comes downstairs," Jorge picked up the story again. "Still doesn't say anything; it's like he doesn't expect us to notice or comment on it. But of course Thom has to speak up."

"He wanted to know if it was Halloween already and, if so, could he go trick-or-treating with Emile?" Jun chuckled at the memory and then stopped. "That actually wasn't too long before…"

"What was Thom like?"

Across the room, Six saw Kat stiffen before slamming her charts against the tabletop. "I can't do this!" she suddenly exclaimed, running a hand through her cropped brown hair. "I'm supposed to be planning a counter-offensive and yet I can't plan anything because I have no idea of what to plan for because recon's turned up nada and yet Holland and Carter expect me to come up with something by tomorrow and…"

She stopped immediately when she saw that the other present team members were staring. "I'm sorry, Jorge, Jun, Six," she said in a quieter tone. "I just need to go somewhere where I can think. Someone come get me when they get back."

"Will do," responded Jorge as Six and Jun nodded agreement. Together, their eyes followed Kat's movements as the female Spartan gathered her papers, diagrams, and data pads and disappeared down the corridor. They waited until the sound of her footsteps dissipated into the low hum of the ventilation and then Jun sighed, saying, "It's that time again."

"Excuse me?" Six demanded clarification, indignant in her manner.

Jun conveniently commenced coughing as Jorge heaved a sigh of his own and said, "Relax, Six; it just looks like… well, when you've been hanging around Kat and Carter since, well, _it _happened–"

"You mean… Thom."

"He means more than that," said Jun, having made a speedy recovery. "But, if you want to get down to brass tacks, yeah. He means since… April. If you stick around with us for any extended period of time, it becomes rather clear that Carter and Kat routinely switch off who's taking the blame for Thom."

The corners of her mouth curled upward even though she knew there was nothing funny about what Jun had said. "Do they coordinate or something? Set up a schedule of guilt trips?"

"Something a little less obvious or synched than that but something like it all the same." Jorge glanced back in the direction Kat had exited. "Well, we know whose turn it is this week."

"If you'll excuse me asking," began Six, surprisingly more polite than her typical attitude but well aware of the broken glass lying around the conversation, "I read the reports from the colony. Why do they feel like it's their responsibility? Couldn't it be Holland's fault as much as anyone else?"

"Well," Jun took a deep breath, weighing this, "Kat did put the operation together more than anyone else did. As for Carter…"

"Is he beating himself up again for being the leader?"

Jorge exchanged a glance with Jun before answering. "Well, I suppose you could argue that," he said hesitantly. "But, if you ask me, it was as much about her feeling guilty as it was about his being the commander."

Six opened her mouth to ask more but a look from Jorge told her it was time to stop asking questions. So she shut it and tried a different tack: "I heard that Carter thinks I'm a lot like Thom."

"And where'd you hear that?" said Jorge, suddenly sharper than before.

With a nonchalant shrug, she replied, "How am I supposed to remember? I hear a lot of things. Is that true though?"

Another look was exchanged and once again she felt left out of some secret. Jun answered, "Jorge knew Thom the best. They bunked together."

"A lot of long watches," Jorge added, flipping over a couple of cards to reveal their faces.

"And you've always bunked with Emile?" Jun shrugged and nodded in response. "And Kat? There wasn't another female Spartan on Noble before."

A third glance told Six that there was definitely something up. Not unlike a fox hearing the rustle of a rabbit's tail, she resisted the urge to lean forward as Jun finally said in a much lower voice, "Kat and Carter bunked together."

_Oh. _She leaned back in her seat again, biting her lower lip but refusing to allow any other emotion to cross her bare face. Never had she more longed for her armor, where everything down to the air she breathed was cool and controlled, nothing like this heat rushing to her face as she evaluated this new… was it new? It wasn't new; it was merely simple information she had not been able to gather. Information like attempting to anticipate an enemy general's tendencies in combat and then being surprised. Nothing more than a battle map that someone had spilled coffee over. Relationships between conscripted individuals were messy; the metaphor was not lost on her. But why had she not seen it coming to begin with?

Six realized that Jorge's hazel eyes had been intent on her face the entire time since Jun's revelation. She met them and shrugged. "I'm not surprised," were the words that spilled from her mouth in cool, calculated, jaded tones. "It wouldn't be the first time anything like that's happened. But what now? What happened?"

He didn't seem fooled though; another eventuality she had not predicted. _This is happening with greater frequency_, Six registered in a corner of her mind. _Better watch that. _"Thom's death was a trump on anything that might've or could've been between them," said the elder Spartan. "Neither of them was the same."

"Which is why we're told again and again in training that frat rules are in place for a reason," rejoined Jun with a chuckle. "Besides, Carter… Well, speak of the devil. So you're back, commander."

Even while chuckling and wearing a grin, Carter's eyes were tired. Six wondered if he ever was anything but drained these days. Ever since they'd moved back to a military hub and settled in for the week, Noble's commander had done everything save completely drop off the map. As the highest ranking Spartan on premises and the commander of a capable team, he'd been pulled into meeting after meeting, sometimes accompanied by Kat, more often going into a conference room solo. He'd been rolling in late, Jorge had told Six, since those meetings often lasted hours and yet Noble Leader had insisted on taking on this recon mission himself, arguing that anything that the rest of his team went through, he should be a part of. But still, even Six saw that Carter was pushing his boundaries.

"Did you think that I wasn't coming home, Jun?" he asked, sinking into the seat beside Jorge at the table. Emile skulked in his commander's shadow, leaning against a counter a few feet away from the rest of his team.

"The thought never crossed my mind," replied Noble Three with a smile, the corners of his eyes stretching to wrinkle the tattoo stamped across his shaved head. That was a lie and they all knew it. How could Spartans –any Spartans –forget the inevitability of death when they practically left an empty seat for it at every table? "Find anything out there?"

Carter shook his head. "I wish. We found traces: abandoned buildings that looked like they'd been hit pretty hard, their occupants disappeared. But there was nothing recent. You and Six will have to go in even deeper."

"That's just what Kat was telling us," replied Jun. "Does someone want to get her?"

"I'll do it," said Six, getting to her feet. She had been itching to get out of the room ever since Carter and Emile had entered though she had taken more pains than usual to conceal it. "Where'd she be?"

It was Jorge and not Carter that spoke though they both turned to her and opened their mouths. "There is a conference room down the hall," he advised. "That'd be where I'd look."

She nodded her thanks and then started down the corridor. The halls of the headquarters were empty; she wasn't surprised. She imagined that everyone else was asleep in their beds at this hour or otherwise engaged on various missions. She heaved a quiet sigh. All of these forces drawn here for a counter-offensive and it'd be a counter-offensive against what? They'd be asking if recon didn't come up with something soon. She supposed that she ought to be thankful that Six had no ambition save to get the job done and that it'd be Carter and Holland consequently that'd make the excuses if there were any questions.

She knocked on the door to the room Jorge had referenced before entering; standard protocol, though she didn't think Kat had anyone in there. "What is it?" asked a muffled voice from the other side.

"They're back," Six answered, stepping back from the door. "You said to have someone get you so… here I am."

"Here you are," she agreed dryly and then the door swung open to reveal a scowling Kat with her arms full of maps. "I suppose that those two told you everything the moment I left."

Six didn't flinch. "If you didn't want them to, you should've stayed."

"Do you think I care?" Kat took a step into the hallway, forcing the other woman to back up. "I have nothing to prove to you. I have nothing to prove to the commander or to Emile or to anybody. So if you think for a moment that you can use any of what they told you against me–"

"I never thought to," she cut her off unexpectedly, shocked into stumbling into honesty. Six blinked very rapidly. Had the thought truly never occurred to her? It was a powerful bit of information if it reduced the typically cool Kat to this; an extreme tactical advantage. Had she truly never thought of turning it to her benefit?

No, she hadn't. Part of Six was confused by this realization, another part irked, but the majority of her told her to move forward. Kat was still staring at her, blue eyes narrowed in suspicion and Six found herself hastening to reassure her. "I wouldn't anyway. Honestly. And I won't got talking about it with anybody."

"You've never seemed to like me enough to keep confidence for me," said Kat, still wary to a fault. "Why?"

"Secrets are secrets, no matter who they're about," she replied with a shrug of her shoulders, "and everyone's got a right to their privacy."

"Nobody, especially not Spartans, are supposed to have secrets that could potentially disrupt their morale during a war. And I should've gotten over him a long time ago."

"And yet we do. Who'd know that better than me? Come on." She jerked her head in the direction of the rec room. "They're waiting on us."

"Good God," said Kat, shaking her head. "What will Emile say this time?"

Kat started down the hallway. Six followed. Subconsciously, she felt herself add Carter's name to the list of men whom she would never allow herself to consider.


	11. Blind Leading

**Winterbirth**

_A Halo Reach Fan Fiction by Marianne Bennet_

**A/N**: And now we get back into the action! Thank you's to my reviewers and my lovely beta-reader EternalEntity. Enjoy!

**Eleven: Blind Leading**

_August 11__th__, 2552 _

In truth, though she might not admit it aloud within anyone's earshot, heights weren't really her thing. Or maybe it was windows and all of potential they had that plagued her mind. A childhood memory of traveling to a place with tall buildings, sometime early in her training, hit her hard. She remembered a gaping window, her head buried in a pillow, being afraid not of the fall but of the jump.

_No, _she told herself. _I changed. There is no jump. The jump does not exist. I've changed._

Traveling in a Falcon by night was just the sort of thing that would bring that up. That there was nothing she could do about present circumstances was a fact that Six took little issue with. She'd long since made peace with the fact that she'd given up her day-to-day decisions at a young age and she was aware that she would not get that power back so long as there was the Covenant to fight. Sometimes she wondered if she'd even know what to do with her life if she ever got it back.

The pilot was saying something. Jun nudged Six's foot with the tip of his boot. "Wake up, Spartan," he said not unkindly. "We've just passed behind the enemy's first line of outposts. I take it this is probably where they picked up Carter and Emile last night. It shouldn't be much farther now."

"We'll take you in as deep as we can," replied the pilot from his station. "You'll have to proceed into the dark zone on foot. You should start hitting the Covies before too long."

"And the other teams only found outposts? They didn't go farther?"

"So it would seem," said Jun in response to Six's question. "We're looking for something a bit bigger, a little more threatening than a couple of grunts and jackals with an elite or two thrown into the mix."

"And do you think there is something bigger out there?"

"You saw their numbers at Sword Base and that's got to be only one of many. My guess is that they can't be pulling all of those numbers just from orbit." He sounded thoughtful. "They've got to have landed ground side somewhere."

"_And it's your job to find out just where 'somewhere' is._" The voice coming over the comm. was Kat's. "_You reading me, Three, Six?_"

"Loud and clear," replied Jun. "We'll check in again once we hit the ground and move in a little closer."

"_I'm looking forward to it. Noble Two out._"

The Falcon began its descent between the cliffs. "This is as far in as I can take you, sir, ma'am," the pilot told them as he pulled up to hover beside a narrow trail that wrapped around the cliff's side. "Watch for the Phantoms. And give the Covies hell."

Jun was smirking behind his visor; she could tell by the angle at which he held his helmeted head. Once they had both leapt out onto the ledge in turn, she turned to her team member and said, "You don't hold much for non-Spartan personnel."

"I just think that Spartans are more likely to get the job done faster and better than any regular UNSC trooper," he said carelessly in response to her statement.

"Do you think then that everyone in the military should undergo Spartan training and augmentation?"

"Well then we wouldn't be special, now would we?" He led the way down the path and past the curve of the mountainside. "Look, Six: I'm a Spartan, not some politician. I have no clue. If anyone asked me to make the big decisions, we'd all be screwed. If people needed to look to _me _to make a big decision in the first place, we're already screwed."

"The blind leading the blind," she recalled.

"Something like that. Wait here."

"What?"

She watched as he snapped his sniper rifle onto his back and began to hoist himself up the cliff side. "Relax, Six; I'm just gonna go take a peek."

That was the kind of thing that she told herself that _she _was supposed to do: go off on her own and look ahead. She wondered at the reasoning on Command's part at putting her and Jun together for this mission. It might have seemed like a brilliant idea at first; put the two scouts together since they'd be able to keep up with each other. But when two soldiers were accustomed to each being the one who runs up ahead, who was going to stay and hold down the fort? It seemed to Six that Carter or Holland or Kat or maybe a combination of the three –whoever it was that had partitioned Noble Team into pairs had chosen to have the "blind lead the blind" when it came to putting Jun and Six together. Well, it didn't matter much anyway so long as they got the job done.

"Do you see anything?" she asked him.

"_The dark zone sure is dark,_" he answered. "_They've got Phantoms running up and down the area with searchlights like the man said. Could it be that they're looking for us?_"

She rolled her eyes. "Right. Can we head forward?"

"_Your move, Six. Wait; here comes one now. Get down low._"

There wasn't anything to "get down low" behind in the immediate vicinity. She saw the Phantom; it was on a marked course not to run directly overhead, thank God, but to curve slightly to Six's left. Still, it would see her if she didn't move and fast.

So she moved fast; easy solution. Six darted forward along the path until she spotted a boulder to the right of the trail that created a narrow space between it and the mountainside. She shimmied between the rock and the hard place, her back against the boulder, her back to the Phantom overhead. It was a moment of tension that she felt right through to the tips of her fingernails. She held her breath but refused to close her eyes. The glare of the Phantom's searchlight against the mountain's face was reflected in her visor but she didn't blink. She lay in wait, watching for the danger to pass.

And the Phantom moved on as she knew it would and, after a moment's passing, there was a sound like a muted rock slide from above and then Jun landed lightly beside her. Dusting off his armored shoulders, he said, "Great. We're alive. And we're nearly there. Let's keep moving, shall we?"

She shrugged. "Your move."

"Isn't it always?" He took the lead and Six kept close, a not so silent shadow, sniper rifle in hand, the twin of Jun's. Carter and Kat had armed them up before they left

Her commander had handed her the rifle's components from a series of cases in the limited armory. He had mistaken the expression on her face when the completed weapon rest in her hands. "Do you want something else?" he had asked with a quizzical line across his brow.

"Are you going to make a habit of handing me my favorite weapons?" she'd said in return.

"So long as you don't use them against me," Carter had replied. "Then I'm happy to keep you armed."

The exchange would mean nothing to anyone else's ears but it caused a confusion in Six that manifested itself as a tightness in her chest. Did he think that she would ever turn her weapon on him? Did she really care about his opinion of her? If so, why? She didn't care about anyone's opinion.

She shook her head and both the remembrance and the interior tension dissipated like smoke. Jun was talking. She should probably pay attention. "Recon Team Bravo reporting in: Noble Three and Six are in position. It's starting to get crowded up here, Kat; did you notice?"

"_Then we're closing in,_" Kat sounded pleased but she wasn't the one with the enemy swooping through overhead. The sound of her voice was also a good reminder of why Six wasn't going to think about her commander anymore. "_Report any Covenant structures or devices, you know the drill, Jun. Direct action might be necessary._"

"Copy that." Jun chuckled and glanced back to his scouting counterpart. "With Kat in charge of an op, you can bet that 'direct action' will be necessary."

Six shrugged. "I have similar principles."

"I bet you do. Well," Jun considered this, "it's not exactly a 'principle' with Kat; it's more of a 'I'm bored up in Command; would something interesting please happen?' thing."

"_I heard that. Cut the chatter, Jun. We have work to do._"

"Copy that too. Here, Six." He tossed something over to her which she was careful to catch. As she inspected the magazine, he added, "They're high velocity, armor piercing, you name it. They'll come in handy; take the hat off an Elite at two thousand yards."

"I'd rather take the head."

"Alright, we get it." Jun sighed. "Look, there's no need to try and out-badass Emile or something. We're all very amazed with what you've accomplished. Even the commander was impressed with what you did at Sword Base. Anyway, these rounds ain't cheap so don't go wasting them." He looked up and around for a moment before finding a decent handhold on the cliff face. "I'll be in touch."

Jun's comment had not made Six happy at all, especially when she considered that it may have been privy to Kat and whomever else happened to be listening. She had heard that he was known for being talkative before she was sent to Noble. She had also heard that his superiors tolerated this quality in Jun since his chatter was usually full of useful information. Well, that particular bit of information he had just shared with her was not useful at all.

There was a shadow against the horizon up ahead. She held her fire as she approached, wanting to verify that the silhouette was indeed an enemy.

"_Elite,_" Jun's voice buzzed confirmation in her ear. "_All yours but keep it quiet._"

"I'm not a fool," she muttered.

"_I never took you for one. Take care of it. Watch the grunts._" She heard his smile. "_Don't step on anybody._"

A jerk of her knife fulfilled the first part of Jun's request; her armored forearm across the Elite's mouth took care of the second. He fell softly; she laid him to rest against the grass as blood pooled around his head like a pillow.

"_Grunts_," he reminded her and three shots of her magnum dealt with that. They were dead before they'd even sat up. She wasn't even sure that any of them had really woken up before she had planted a bullet in its head. "_Not bad,_" said Jun approvingly.

She didn't linger; there was too much that had to be done. What looked like an entire Covenant operation was sprawled out before her, crawling with elites, jackals, grunts, but this couldn't be _it. _This couldn't be the real threat.

Jun seemed to be thinking along the same lines. "_Recon Bravo to Noble Two,_" she heard him say, "_Stand by for contact report._"

There was a moment's pause and then: "_Standing by to copy, over._"

"_We have eyes on multiple hostiles patrolling a settlement,_" he was saying as Six lifted her sniper rifle to her gaze. A few clicks of the scope took her in to the hijacked settlement. "_Is this what we're looking for, Kat?_"

"_Negative,_" Kat replied. "_It's too small and you're not in the dark zone yet anyway._" Six adjusted the scope again, half-listening. Her gaze passed over grunts and jackals before resting on a single, taller enemy. Well, Jun had told her to put the ammo to good use. "_Engage at your own discretion but keep moving._"

A shot rang out through the settlement. The elite crumpled and fell from the building's roof under Six's satisfied gaze. She glanced up and caught sight of Jun looked down on her from a higher ridge along the cliff. "_Whoops,_" she heard amusement in his tone, "_already engaged, Kat._"

"_Not necessarily a bad thing,_" she thought she could hear Kat smile as well. "_But keep it quick and quiet._"

"_Six?_"

"Don't have to tell me twice," muttered Six not quite under her breath as she employed the sniper rifle to dispatch a couple of elites that had just emerged from the settlement's interior. The pair fell face-down upon the cracked pavement and the effect was immediate: the grunts in the courtyard immediately scattered like balls on a pool table, running in all directions, occasionally colliding with one another. Six paid them little mind; they'd be dealt with later.

The jackals held their ground, lifting their alternating red and blue shields to cover their heads like glossy, opaque umbrellas, shielding themselves from Jun's rapid fire. One of their number was unlucky; a flailing grunt ran headlong into its shield and they both tumbled to the ground like dominoes, easy pickings for Jun.

Six slid down the slope; however, the momentum did not result in an easy landing. She hit the ground with a roll and leapt back up to her feet in time for a skirmisher to make a brave attempt to tackle her. That wasn't about to happen. A backhanded swipe of her knife made the assailant leap back; a shot from her magnum finished the job.

There was something like a screech across the sky and a roar in Six's ears followed as a Phantom descended upon the Covenant-claimed settlement like some massive bird of prey. "_Looks like we pissed them off,_" commented Jun wryly as Six dove for cover.

Her back pressed against the leeward side of a building, she added, "And we're just getting started. Watch out!"

The Phantom unleashed a series of blasts. Six shut her eyes against the glare and opened them to find a scorch mark against the pavement two yards left into the open. She looked away again and then the elite was on her from behind.

She shoved all of her weight backward and felt the alien's knees buckle behind her. She pinned it to the floor under her weight and twisted in her assailant's loosened grip, reaching with both hands to grasp the elite's neck.

Its grip on her waist was as strong as her grip on its neck but it did not have the freedom of movement that she had achieved with her earlier maneuver. Spotting a jagged block of rubble three yards or so before her, she braced the soles of her feet against the cracked pavement and pushed forward, dragging the elite across the space along with her. She saw equal parts fear and confusion in its face… _no, don't look at the eyes. Never look at the eyes. _And then she shifted her grip from its neck to its head and lifted the elite's skull up and slammed it down against the block.

She heard the crack before she saw the blood and dropped the head immediately; using her legs thrust her entire body away from the corpse, she scrambled backward into the cover of the building, pressing her back against the wall again.

"Six!" It was Jun, running through the courtyard, sniper rifle still in hand. "Six, are you alright?"

She blinked up at him, murmuring. "It's messy, isn't it?"

"It snuck up on you, right?" She nodded in response. He offered her his hand. "Are you okay?"

"They keep doing that to me." She clasped her hands to quell their shaking rather than take his and let him pull her to her feet. "Why do they keep doing that?"

Jun made a noise like sucking his breath in through gritted teeth. The sound was vaguely reminiscent of Carter. "Don't get like this on me now," he told her.

"I am not getting like anything on anyone," she retorted, planting her palms against the bloodstained floor to push herself to her feet. "We have a job to do, don't we?"

"And now you're telling me?" He sighed, a heavy sound that drowned out any response Six could make. "Alright; trail leads behind this place. It's crawling with hostiles. Should be a welcome distraction."

"If distractions are ever welcome," she agreed reluctantly. "I'm alright; why would I not be? Let's go."

They looped around the buildings together and started down the trail's continuation on the other side of the settlement. The mountains seemed to close in on all sides; she looked up and saw nothing but a sliver of the night sky winding a path that ran parallel to theirs. It was similar to gazing at the stars through one's fingers.

She tore her eyes away from the river of sky to glance at her radar. "I'm picking up something… big."

"'Big' as in what we're looking for?"

"Big as in I don't know what the hell this thing is but I'd start running in the opposite direction if I had the choice."

"You always have a choice."

"Ha."

The ground seemed to tremble ever so slightly as they approached a bend in the trail. Jun was coming up with various theories, none of which Six found to be particularly entertaining. "Trail's too narrow to get a Scarab up through here… maybe they found enough open ground to land a Phantom? Could be a couple of hunters I suppose but they'd have to be big…"

Six walked past him and stopped abruptly at the mouth of a clearing. "What the hell are those things?" she asked no one in particular in a flat voice.

Jun moved to stand beside her. He whistled under his breath. "Well would you look at that."

Huge creatures –Six didn't know what to call them; she'd slept through most of her animal biology classes –were on the rampage against the Covenant. It was… something like a cross between an elephant or a boar with an ogre out of a fairytale with two talons for fingers or paws that it used to rake up a handful of grunts and scatter them across the clearing. It was like something out of a fantasy movie, something that belonged with giant apes and genetically spliced dinosaurs. In short, it was something that needed to be avoided

Jun seemed to have a different opinion. "Looks like it's on our side," he observed wryly as it flung a pair of jackals into the cliff side.

"Are you kidding? When it's done with them, it'll come for us." But she made no motion to flee, still studying the creatures and their movements. "Do you think they disturbed its… nest or something?"

"I'm not a xenobiologist either. Why do you think I have the answers to these questions? Wait… ah shit, incoming!"

After finishing off what remained of the Covenant forces, the creatures caught sight of the two Spartans and crossed the clearing in two bounds. Six sprinted left, reloading her sniper rifle with the special ammo. "Eyes, Jun!" she shouted over one creature's roar. "Aim for the eyes!"

"You think I don't know that?" he yelled back at her from across the clearing. She heard him shoot once, twice. One creature fell. "Two shots to the skull will do it too!"

She took aim and fired. It was a dead shot to the eye but she'd had more leisure to line up the reticle than Jun apparently had. She stood for a moment, feeling very pleased with her performance as the creature moaned and swayed above her. And then it began to fall.

Six dove left, rolling out of the way of the creature's collapse by a disturbingly small margin. As the dust settled around both corpse and Spartan, she heard Jun ask, "Kat, pick any of that up?"

"_Affirmative, Recon Bravo: It's an indigenous creature, called a,_" she paused, consulting with someone. "_It's called a 'G__ù__ta.'_"

"Never heard of it. What about you, Six?"

"I'd have no idea about creatures, indigenous or otherwise," she shrugged. "Were you worried that it was an endangered species, Jun?"

Jun shook his head, more in exasperation than honest disagreement. "You don't have to do that, you know?" he told her very quietly over a private channel. "And I suspect that we'd like you all better if you didn't."

Six had nothing to say to that so she said nothing at all, merely shouldered her sniper rifle and led the way into the darkness of the path again.


	12. Vital

**Winterbirth**

_A Halo Reach Fan Fiction by Marianne Bennet_

**A/N**: Even more action! Thank you's to my reviewers and my lovely beta-reader EternalEntity. Enjoy!

**Twelve: Vital**

_August 11__th__, 2552 _

Whatever doesn't kill you makes you stronger or so the cliché went. Thinking along similar lines, Six reasoned that it was a pretty good policy to not leave anything alive in her wake to bite her in the ass later. Those guidelines were easy enough to abide by when the only things stumbling into her scope's eye were Covenant bastards but when civilians –and not just that but careless and frantic civilians who obviously didn't know how to use a magnum though their behavior insisted that they thought otherwise –were involved, her relative morality on the battlefield got a lot more complicated.

She hadn't needed Kat to tell her that these were civilians worth saving. It wasn't even a matter of how much their potential intel was worth; it was a matter of heading home to HQ and looking Jorge or Carter in the eye after they'd heard that she'd let the survivors go by the wayside. _Wait, _the thought gave her pause as she crouched against the raised edge of a walkway above a small fleet of jackals. _Am I really thinking about that now? _

Six nailed four jackals in the head in quick succession with a DMR she'd picked up along the way from the first Covenant outpost while distinctly intrigued at the separation of thinking and reflex she was experiencing. Down went the enemy but her thoughts were up with someone else. _That's interesting, _she thought meditatively while detached complacency hovered somewhere close to her chest as the field before her gradually cleared and ammo disappeared from her pockets. _That's strange._

"_Six? How are you doing up there?_"

"Oh, the usual, Jun," she replied carelessly as she mechanically dispatched the final jackal. "Killing stuff. Blowing up shit."

"_There haven't been any explosions. Alright, look: we've got a bit of a situation._"

"Hit me." Satisfied that she'd done her momentary duty by the Covenant, she shouldered the DMR and eased into a jog that took her through the Covenant commandeered and re-purposed pump station. Nothing on radar; a good if not somewhat boring sign.

"_Well, this actually might be to our advantage. You'll see when you come around here._"

Jun was still finishing up the last bit of that sentence when Six came running along the pathway. Her fellow Spartan was surrounded by several slightly sheepish members of the local militia they'd rescued, none of which looked particularly appreciative. He nodded at her approach and called her attention to a couple of metal cases lying against the ground as one of the militia troopers noted, "So, there're two of you after all."

"Did you think he was doing this all by himself?" asked Six, jerking her helmeted head in Jun's direction.

The militia trooper who had spoken –a stocky, medium-sized man whose age Six estimated to be around thirty or so –shrugged. "You Spartans are good in a fight. Even one makes a big difference. Us? Well, this is a little more action than we're used to."

"Undoubtedly," said Jun in response. "You're hardly equipped let alone have anything close to the training to handle the Covenant."

"We're aware of that," replied a second trooper, this one shorter with dark hair and a wounded arm clutched against his side, bristling at Jun's comment. "We've all heard it one way or another from every Spartan any of us have met."

Six frowned. "You could be a little more grateful."

"Oh, they'll be grateful," Jun assured her without taking his eyes off of the troopers. "They'll be very grateful; especially considering what exactly I think is in those cases. So," he directly addressed the first trooper, "does someone want to tell me exactly what you all are doing back here? The area is supposed to be evacuated and we were _very _thorough, isn't that right, Six?"

She had no idea how thorough or otherwise they'd been in the evacuation process but she nodded all the same. "We were pretty sure we'd picked up everyone."

"So does someone want to enlighten us as to how a couple of civilians slipped the net?"

The militia troopers were silent for a long moment before the tall man who had spoken first decided to cooperate on behalf of his group. "Look, we weren't trying to do anything wrong," he began. "We just didn't like leaving it to somebody else to defend our home. You get that?"

"Yeah," said Six before she could stop herself.

"So we left when we were told to, alright? Nobody told us outright that we couldn't go back so, hell, first chance we got we broke off and we came back for this," he nodded toward the metal cases and then to another trooper who promptly began to unbuckle the first case. "We have them stashed away all through the territory and they weren't going to do anyone any good just lying around where no one else could find them."

Jun knelt to inspect the contents of the first case and Six let out a low whistle of appreciation upon quick examination of the second and third. Grenades like those could blow a couple elites sky high before she even had time to think about what she was doing as she popped the trigger. All that and enough shotguns to make Emile go green with envy. Maybe those militia troopers were onto something with all of this purloined firepower.

At face value, her fellow Spartan appeared to be of a different mind. Jun first glanced to her and then to the troopers, saying, "You know this stuff is stolen."

The trooper whom had spoken second scoffed and Six didn't blame him for it. There was no chance of anyone being taken to task for petty theft behind enemy lines. "And what are you going to do about it? You gonna arrest us all?"

"No," Jun sounded smug. "We're just going to steal it back."

Six emphasized this decision by filching a set of substitute rounds for her sniper rifle and dropping her DMR in exchange for a shotgun. To Jun, she asked, "What do you propose we do about the civilians?"

"I'd just as well leave it to Command," he replied as he sifted through various pieces of contraband weaponry and ammo before settling upon a fresh magazine for his own gun. "They might have ideas as to how they can be of use to us."

"They could lead us into the dark zone. They'd be more or less familiar with the terrain."

"There's an idea."

"They don't seem to like us much."

Jun shrugged as he got back up to his feet. "You heard them: we're Spartans. They resent us on principle."

"That doesn't bother you?"

"Can you blame them much? People like Halsey treat them like second-class soldiers."

_It shouldn't matter_, she thought to herself as grenades rolled between her gloved fingers. _We're all human._

She was still thinking about that as well as contemplating the same handful of extra plasma grenades when she heard the screech across the sky that marked the arrival of a Phantom. Around her, the militia troopers scattered into defensive positions, leading her to wonder if Jun had underestimated their combat experience after all. They certainly knew when to duck and cover, which was more to say than her sometimes, remembering what had happened on her first mission with Noble Team when Carter had shoved her down and out of the way…

_No. _Elites and skirmishers poured like locusts from the Phantom's mouth, like some overdue plague that God suddenly wished on humanity. Six had never been a believer but she had to trust that someone up there had it in for her as the suicidal grunts came rushing in. She heard a trooper scream as she traded off dodging and firing bullets and it seemed that the sound drowned out all else. He had been _alive _a moment ago and now he wasn't.

She found a decent vantage point up on a walkway above the general mayhem and reloaded her sniper rifle, figuring that somewhere Jun was doing the same. Taking aim, her gaze passed over three struggling militia troopers and pulled the trigger, dispatching the pair of skirmishers that had been harassing them. She took satisfaction in the kills; she hated things that leapt just within reach and then immediately darted back out of sight.

Elites fell into that category as well; a well-placed headshot dealt with the one dancing outside of Jun's range, a knife to the second Elite that tried to sneak up on her that night. She felt a savage satisfaction at having wised up to the underhanded attack, at watching blood stain the handle of her knife. But just when she'd shaken her head and shaken herself out of the momentary wave of bloodlust, the second Phantom descended.

"_Well, we really just pissed them off,_" drawled Jun in her ear.

"You can say that again," she muttered.

"_If I was Emile, I would._" Having deposited its cargo, the enemy ship took off into the night sky. "_Watch your flank, Six._"

She took his advice and was grateful for it, shifting position to tackle an inbound clump of jackals to her left. She heard a trooper whoop as the enemy dispersed, a cry of victory quickly smothered when yet another Phantom swooped in. Six clenched her teeth in frustration. "Jun, we can't do this if they keep rolling in like this. We'll catch hell from Kat if we don't move forward."

"_You do realize that if we leave these men–"_

"Yes, I realize it!" She sniped an Elite, taking down its shields with the round, and then tossed a grenade into the mix. "And why not take them with us? It isn't as though we can send them back. And there's nothing here but the lake."

There was a pause as Jun considered this during which Six kept herself busy managing a skirmisher's fire until she could take it down with her shotgun. Finally, despite what Six had said, the Phantom took back off into the sky and she skirted back down around the perimeter to regroup with Jun and the remaining troopers.

The dark haired militia trooper that had first brought up the issue of Spartans' disdain for regular soldiers was still nursing his injured arm when Six came back around. His comrades-at-arms were grouped around him and Jun; the tall leader had not survived that last wave.

"…Road leads to a hydro plant," the wounded trooper was saying. "The gate's broke so you won't get far going that way."

"I take it you know of an alternate route?"

"Down along the riverbed," confirmed another trooper, standing at attention by his comrade. He shrugged somewhat uneasily. "It's pretty reliable. We, um, used it a lot for…"

"Smuggling," Jun finished. "And where does it go?"

"Straight to the plant," he answered.

"Is there any water we have to worry about?" Six wanted to know.

"The river's been damned these past forty-five years," was the response and it came from the dark haired trooper. "My great-granddad worked on the plant's original ground plan. It powered up every settlement in the territory. It'd be a grand shame if it all goes to waste."

"We're doing what we can," replied Jun through gritted teeth.

"Really? They send us two Spartans and that's it? Should we be groveling at your feet and thanking you? You saved maybe half a dozen men. The Covenant's on Reach."

Something in Six broke. "You wait until dawn," she snapped. "And then we'll see who's out in the field and who's back in the med or getting shipped off world to safety, for all of your talk! Now which way is the riverbed? I'd love to get out of your hair; you can find your own damned way back!"

She stared at them all, waiting for a response, and Jun was quiet. Finally, one trooper cleared his throat and said, "I'll… I'll show you the way, ma'am."

"Thank you," she replied. "Let's go, Jun."

…

The hydroelectric plant was back-lit by some kind of pylon, obviously of Covenant origin. Six walked forward, her eyes intent upon the structure as Jun consulted with Kat over the comm. "Do we have confirmation on pick up of the militia troops?" he was asking.

"_Affirmative,_" Kat was answering. "_As for the pylon you're looking at, I suspect that's the source of our little problem._"

"Consider it gone."

"_Not so fast, Three. The dark zone can stay dark awhile longer; we'll deal with it come dawn._"

"What's going on tomorrow?"

"_Something big. We'll find out when Command gets their act together a bit more. Until then, stick a remote det charge on the thing. It'll go boom tomorrow morning._"

"You hear that, Six?"

"As well as you did." She scoped out the situation, taking care in analyzing the Covenant forces lurking around the plant's exterior. "There's no saying what's inside the compound or what the Covenant might drop on our heads but what's outside so far should be no problem."

"That sounds promising," replied Jun as the two Spartans started for the bridge that led across to the plant's complex.

"Now here's the big question," she paused, lingering before crossing the bridge. "Are we going to be sneaky or are we going to face the bastards up front?"

"The remote det will take some time to get set up. I'd rather we clear the field before I get started if it's all the same with you."

She shrugged. "Either way the Covenant's gonna die. I'll follow your lead."

"Still," he paused, "we can be sneaky even when we're taking them out up front." He loaded fresh ammo into his rifle and took up a position halfway across the bridge. "Cover me when they start for us, won't you?"

Across the way, an elite's head was bent in mute conference with its fellow specialist. Six had no idea what they might be discussing, anything from the weather to an attack to that the other outpost seemed to have dropped off of the map. She couldn't tell if the expression on one elite's face betrayed sadness while the look that the other elite wore might just have well indicated elation. But why think about that? Why think about that _now_?

A shot brought Six back to earth and blood ran like a waterfall from the sliver of skin between the taller elite's silver shoulder plate and helmet. The alien crumpled like a marionette whose strings had been snipped and there was a moment of strange silence between the imagined thump of the body against the ground and the audible roar that sprung from its companion's throat. The howl was silenced by a shot that erupted from Six's rifle; the point of impact between the eyes.

Fire rang out over the bridge; both Spartans dropped into an even lower crouch to keep from being hit. "Well," said Jun reasonably, "that's two that we don't have to worry about. Do we go in now or do we pick them off as they come over the bridge?"

Six opted for holding position and letting the enemy come to them and so that's what they did. When the bridge had become an unburied graveyard by their efforts, she and Jun made for the pylon.

He dropped to his knees beside what she could only presume to be the structure's power supply and his hands dove into the various pockets of his armor. Out poured various tools that she could tell were constructed for one use only followed by a small, boxy device a little bigger than the length of her hand. She picked up from where he had laid it to rest beside his kneecap, wondering at how something so small could have such an impact.

Jun popped open the paneling on the side of the pylon's generator closest to the gorge. Yanking some wiring out into the crook where the generator met one of the structure's legs, he pinched two wires between a pair of pliers and set a small copper filament between them. "This is going to take a minute," he said, throwing the warning over his shoulder at her. "There's no telling what they'll throw at us in that time and I'm not going to be much help. Keep your eyes peeled. There's no way they're sending nothing."

"Because that would be just too easy," she muttered, setting the charge back down against the ground.

"They're fighting for something too. You can't blame them for not making our job easier."

"Watch me."

"Maybe what they're fighting for is just as important to them as what we're fighting for is to us."

"We're fighting for survival, Jun. Nothing is more important." She paused, scanning the complex for new enemies. "And besides: if there was something else going on, they could open their mouths and tell us instead of shooting first and asking questions later."

"You sound like the commander," he replied with a chuckle. Six didn't find that funny. "Well, communication is vital I suppose." He glanced upward suddenly. "Look up, Six. Maybe you can try talking this time."

Twin thuds marked the arrival of a pair of hunters just abreast of the pylon, too close for neither Jun's nor Six's comfort. She let her sniper rifle clatter to the floor before darting outside, running parallel the edge of the gorge at a sprint. She looped back around toward the pylon, rushing toward the hunters from behind. She remembered Sword Base and what she and Kat had accomplished there but that had been two on two. The odds were certainly less in her favor this time around but she did not allow herself to be daunted. As long as she kept moving…

She remembered the parable of the turtle and the hare… or was it a tortoise? Never mind; the hunter in her path looked as much like a turtle as it did a tortoise and why did it get to crawl under a shell and hide and she never get that luxury? _Where did that come from?_ Never mind.

Anyway, as long as she kept running forward and then drawing back, always stepping to the left and not to the right, never letting it catch her in the green light of its gaze –or was it his gun? _His _gun? _Where did that come from?_ –she might pull it off.

She loaded up the shotgun and stepped out of the shadow of the plant's main building. Someone had told her that hunters didn't see very well and she was ready to exploit every advantage she had over any enemy she would come to face.

She pressed her shotgun to the creature's back, wondering if it had ever felt the coolness of metal there before. She knew what it felt like to do it, to push the barrel against skin, to pull the trigger, and for the first time she was aware of all the times she had done it before. And with that came the realization of how many times she would do it again.

Firing three shots in as quick succession as a shotgun's cool down period would allow her, she made the creature howl. Its companion shrieked with it, as the one back at Sword Base had done before. Was there a correlation? She doubted it and correlation never implied causation anyway.

The hunter staggered on its massive feet, its shoulders slumped and heaving its weight dragging itself face forward and down. She let it fall and stood for a moment but then a green flash akin to that at the moment of sunset flared in the corner of her vision and she dropped down too, playing at death while the first hunter lay motionless beside her. They lay still like stone effigies upon a carved tomb as the blast of the other hunter's weapon flared overhead and then she slammed her palms against the ground, pushed herself to her feet in bound, and threw herself at the second hunter with her next step.

She launched herself at the creature, gripped its right shoulder with her left hand, and leapt over its weapon to land in a somewhat messy roll. Recovering quickly, she turned, latched onto its shoulders with both arms, locked her armor, took a breath, waiting, and then flew backward as the enemy collapsed.

She lay flat on her back for a moment, reveling in the sound of her own shallow yet steady breathing. The hunters were dead and Six was alive; it was a cause for celebration if there ever was one. Every time she killed, an enemy that might have been the end of her otherwise was sent to the grave in her place and maybe even in the place of others, of more innocent people. She banished all other thoughts; it was dead and she was alive that was what counted.

Jun bounded forward. He was holding not only his own rifle but hers as well. "Six," he was saying. "Six, are you alright? I saw the hunter throw you."

"Am I alright?" she repeated and felt her lips part in contemplation of the so simple yet so compelling question. She willed the muscles close to her abdomen to move and felt herself draw forward into a sitting position. "Yes, I think so."

His shoulders slumped in relief. "Great; I was not looking forward to telling Carter you'd died on me."

She ignored that. "I take it you dealt with the charges?"

"All set and ready to blow whenever Command wants an blast."

"You tell Kat?"

"Better take care of that." He took a few paces into the darkness and away from her. "Recon Bravo to Noble Two: charge placed."

"_Acknowledged. I hope you put them somewhere inconspicuous._"

"Nobody's going to find them unless they want to go digging through the power supply."

"_Alright then._" Kat sounded pleased. "_Continue into the dark zone. You'll be in the thick of it as soon as you make it past that southeast gate._"

"Copy that. We should find something soon."

"_So we all hope._"

Six rose to her feet with atypical grace as Jun circled back around toward her. "You hear all that?" he asked but did not wait for an answer. "Let's go. It's getting close to dawn and we'd better be out of here before people start waking up."

She nodded and added, "I suspect we'll have a busy day tomorrow anyway."

"You got that right," he chuckled and started for the gate. Six looked to the east. She didn't want any light sneaking up on her, whether it was the dawn or otherwise.


	13. Cracks Begin to Show

**Winterbirth**

_A Halo Reach Fan Fiction by Marianne Bennet_

**A/N**: The updates are going to be a little more sporadic going forward but bear with me. I'll make it worth the wait. I've been waiting to write this chapter for I don't know how long but I've got to warn you: there's a curveball coming up in the plot. Another warning: there is a bit of foul language coming up that is more atypical of my usual brand. If you take issue with that sort of thing, read on at your own risk.

I'd like to thank my wonderful reviewers and readers, especially those that have stuck with me from the beginning, as well as my lovely beta-reader EternalEntity. Enjoy!

**Thirteen: Cracks Begin to Show**

_August 12__th__, 2552 _

The sky to the east was luminous but not with the coming dawn. Beside her in the underbrush, Jun's breathing was slow and remarkably steady; a cool contrast to Six's racing heartbeat. She tried to quell her restlessness as the two Spartans crawled forward on knees and elbows to meet the drop at a perpendicular angle. Finally, Six reached out with her left hand, gripped the cliff's jagged edge, pulled herself forward, and felt her jaw drop in surprise before her lips pulled back in a silent snarl.

It was an army that was sprawled out across the valley floor like some toxic algae or moss upon a smooth stone. The sky was alit for all the wrong reasons, a backdrop for Corvettes, Banshees, and Phantoms galore. Speechless, her gaze mutely traced the enemy camp's perimeter, thinking of hundreds of elites, thousands of skirmishers, her estimations growing wilder in sequence to her heartbeat. Fear she had felt before when looking upon an enemy; this creeping and irrepressible despair, not so much.

She could push feelings aside to the corner of her mind even if she couldn't get rid of them altogether, build up a wall brick by brick between fear and grief and sorrow and where she did her thinking, so that's what Six did as Jun flicked on his comm. and said, "Jackpot."

"_Noble Two to Recon Bravo: have you found something that's worth our looking at?_"

"I think the visual speaks for itself, Kat. Six?"

"Sending it over," she replied tonelessly, mechanically like she was some wind-up toy and she went through the motions to send the view of the valley to Command with the same precision.

There was silence at the other end and she tried to imagine what they were feeling as they looked through Six's eyes on what had all of the potential to be an apocalypse. Had any of them, even Kat who claimed she prepared herself for every eventuality, thought for a moment that it could be this much? What was someone who had grown up on Reach, someone like Jorge, thinking when they looked in on this invasion? But Six didn't want to think so she sealed that all up behind the wall too.

"Are you seeing this, Kat?"

"_Confirmed,_" her voice was cool and clipped, coming over the comm. like a winter breeze. "_We are receiving live visual from Noble Three and Noble Six of a Covenant strike force._"

"_That isn't a strike force, Kat._" It was Carter coming in over the comm. now. Again, Six became very aware that he saw only what she was seeing. "_That's an invading army._"

"It's an invading army that we have to do something about," Jun cut back into the conversation. "And, if we're going to get anything done, we have to go in hard and fast."

"_We're working on it,_" Kat spoke for both herself and her commander, Six assumed. "_All recon teams fall back. Sun's going to be up in a few hours and we're going to have a very busy day._"

"Acknowledged," replied Jun and Six heard the click as the channel was cut but he made no motion to get up or move back away from the edge. Heaving a sigh, he turned his helmeted head toward her and said conversationally, "And what do you think about all of this, Six?"

She couldn't remove her eyes from the glowing Covenant hub. "I think," she began slowly and then stopped. "I think Jorge will be _very_ pissed."

"I didn't ask what _Jorge _will be thinking."

"I think." She paused again, considering what she was actually thinking at the moment and whether she had the nerve to be honest. Deciding that she did, Six answered, "I think we're screwed."

Jun shook his head with a small snort of exasperation. "You can't go out into battle thinking that."

"Watch me."

"You don't have to do that. I already told you."

"Do what?" She felt the color rise to her face, knowing exactly what he was talking about.

"Look, I don't know what you think you've got to hide from the rest of us," he said in a very quiet voice. "But I'm telling you that it can't be any worse than what the rest of us have been through. I don't know what you did or what Carter said but I'm not seeing a reason for the way you two are acting. And, in my opinion, there should be a reason for everything, especially for deciding that you dislike someone. Now come on," he shoved himself away from the ledge, sliding backward a yard. "We have a long walk back."

…

HQ was quiet. Six pushed open the door to the rec room that Noble Team shared on and off with another Spartan deployment and found an empty room save one Spartan-II gazing out of the window. She smiled at Jorge's back. "I thought you'd all be asleep."

He shook his head without turning around. "Emile can sleep through a nesting Gùta on the rampage; Jun hardly ever. I usually fall in somewhere in between but do you think I could sleep tonight?"

"No." There was no use dressing up a skeleton. She stepped up to stand beside him, looking out onto a courtyard that was barren in its practicality. "What was it like?"

"What was what like?"

"Having Halsey looking after you when you were little; what was it like?"

He did not seem surprised at her question. "Sometimes like living in a petri dish," he answered, blunt to the point of being harsh. "Sometimes like looking up and seeing a microscope instead of the sun, if that makes any sense. And sometimes it was… different." The corners of his mouth twitched upward in a smile as bitter as it was brief. "I think she sometimes felt sorry for us, all of us in the program, so she'd find strange little ways to compensate that I don't think that anyone except she really understood."

"Like what?"

He looked at her strangely but did not reproach her for being too nosy. "Well, Spartan-IIs have secrets since we're so special. A lot of those secrets are ones that she taught us personally, things like… songs and rhymes when we were younger. I mean, a lot of them turned out to be secret codes or signals that we could use among ourselves when we went out into the field but she taught us them like they meant something else. Stuff like that."

"She was kind of like your mother," she realized slowly.

"Yeah, well we were the first." Jorge smiled again, wistfully this time. "I don't think there was ever a Spartan class quite like us. Uh," he paused, looking down at her. "Sorry."

She shrugged. "Well, I can't say that anyone took any special interest in me. Someone like Halsey won't touch me with a ten foot pole after…" Six stopped herself just in time.

Wisely, he did not press her on the subject and turned his gaze back to look out onto the courtyard. "What do you think of right before you go into battle, Six?" he asked her after a moment's silence.

Shifting uncomfortably from foot to foot, she replied, "I tell myself that if everything is… ruined… I'll find some way to start over again."

"What do you mean?"

"Like…" She sighed quickly but not in any manner to indicate exasperation or anything like it. "Like… There will always be a reset button or… something like that. You know, um… 'I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead. I lift my lids and all is born again.' Something like… that."

"It sounded like you were quoting something."

Pressing the tip of her index finger into the corner of her left eye, she admitted, "Well, yeah. Yeah, I am. My mother was a Plath fan."

"A what?" He sounded curious rather than contentious but she took offense all the same.

"Why do you do this?" She didn't wait for him to answer. "How do you do this? You've gotten two bits of information out of me that I haven't tell anyone in… how long have I been talking to you?"

"Relax, Spartan," he said gently, resting a hand upon her shoulder. "Take it easy. Everyone lets bits of their past slip out. Even the things that they might not want other people to know come tumbling out now and again."

She didn't say anything for a moment and Jorge, displaying considerable insight once again, did not speak either. And then suddenly, she said, "Thanks."

"For what?"

"For reminding me that I'm a Spartan and I shouldn't be acting like this."

She felt his gaze on her for a long moment before he replied, "Yeah, you're a Spartan. So am I. But we're also human and humans act like this and neither of us should forget it."

Six didn't find that she had anything to say in response so she ran her fingers through her hair, unraveling the braids, and stared at her shoes. As she contemplated the minute auburn strands at the end of a lock of her hair, Jorge began to whistle, taking her by surprise. She listened to him go through the tune a few times and then found herself joining in.

"I don't know that one," she said as they came to the conclusion of their third round.

"I wouldn't think that you would," he replied. "It's a closely guarded secret… and I'm not entirely kidding here. 'Oxen Free' is one of those Spartan-II codes that I told you about, one of the ones Halsey taught us. Like I said, it's a secret."

"Then why let me in?"

"I'm not sure. Are you going to go and tell anybody, Six?" Jorge started whistling again and wrapped up the melody this time with, "_All out in the free. We're all free._"

"We're all free," she repeated and smiled. "I like it. Does anyone else know it, excepting Halsey and the other Spartan-IIs?"

Jorge suddenly cleared his throat. "Well, only a few important outsiders know about it. It's a security risk, to be clear, since we use it so often and it means so much but we tell people, sometimes, when we feel those people are….also important."

She blinked a couple of times, tricked into smiling at her shoes again, and then: "Sylvia Plath," she burst out. "It's Sylvia Plath, the –the poem I was quoting earlier. My… my mother used to read Plath's poetry to me when I was little, the nice pieces anyway. My mother loved Plath. Especially this one about a mad girl… I don't remember," she lied. "Something like: _I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead. I lift my lids and all is born again. I think I made you up inside my head._ Something like that." She scratched the back of her neck. "Yeah, something like that."

"I know Plath," he said suddenly and then chuckled. "Didn't she stick her head in an oven a couple centuries ago?"

She laughed too. "Something like that," she repeated and then was silent.

Jorge was still looking down on her, watching her gaze skirt away to the right and away from him. Kindly, he reached over and took her shoulder. "Hey," he said in a voice similar to that he had employed when addressing Sara back at Visegrad. "Look, it's alright. See here," gently he lifted her chin, "you've got pretty eyes, Six."

She shrugged but did not pull away. "When I first came to Reach, Halsey said I had my mother's eyes."

There was the sound of a door opening down the corridor. She thought she had imagined for a moment until familiar sets of footsteps came down the corridor and Six jerked away from Jorge just before Emile and Carter entered the rec room.

"You two do know that the shit's gonna hit the fan tomorrow?" asked Emile by way of a conversation starter. Neither said anything in response. He squinted at them suspiciously. "Big man? Newbie?"

"So it's going to go down tomorrow," said Six in an effort to bridge the yawning gap in the room. "Commander?"

Carter's blue gaze flicked back and forth between Six and Jorge but he did nothing to indicate suspicion or surprise. He shrugged at her question. "Yeah, you can say that."

"And apparently that's all he can say," Emile interjected as he tossed his wiry frame into a chair. "Everything else is 'top secret.'"

"Which means you shouldn't be asking about it," Carter rounded on the warrant officer.

"Denied. Hypothetical. Leading the witness," Emile ticked them off on his fingers and then stretched back against the chair's back. "God, I'm hungry again already. Make me something to eat, newbie."

Six shook her head in exasperation as Carter said, "Go to bed already, Emile."

"Is that an order, commander?"

"Damn right it is."

Emile mock saluted his commander before smirking at the trio of Spartans as he leapt up to his feet and started for the door. As he passed Six, he muttered to her, "I told you he noticed," and then he was gone down the corridor. She only blinked at his comment.

Carter looked around at the present members of his team. "You'd better see if you can scrape up a couple hours too, Jorge," he said to the Spartan. Six made as to follow Jorge out of the room but Carter stopped her before she took two steps. "Not you, Six. I want to talk to you for a second."

She waited until Jorge was far enough down the hallway to the dormitories and then stood at attention. "Do you need me for something, sir?"

"Are you worried about tomorrow?" he asked.

"Do you mean if I'm wondering if I'm going to die tomorrow?" She raised an eyebrow.

"Well," he paused, considering. "Well, are you?"

A smile tugged at the corner of her mouth. "Right after I was pulled from Beta Company, I went into a pretty deep anti-insurrectionist operation. It lasted a while; I had some pretty decent downtime. A psychic by the side of the road told me that, since I cheated death at such a young age, I'd have a short life; that I would be able to sense my death before it happened; and that if I did everything right I'd have no regrets."

"And it's not happening tomorrow?" Carter looked skeptical.

"No," she replied, slightly cheerful. "It's not." Six paused and then said, "Sir, I… I didn't mean to waste your time."

"Enough with the sir," he said, waving a hand and motioning for her to sit down. She did. "I've never been big on formalities and I want to make it clear that I'm not talking to you as your commander or your leader or whatever," he told her as he took a seat across the table. "I'm talking to you as your fellow Spartan and I want to be sure that you know that."

"Alright," she replied cautiously, unsure of what was coming. "What's going on?"

"I've heard that you've been having a couple of issues out in the field." His tone may have been meant to be reasonable but Six felt her hands clench.

She quickly placed her palms down against her knees. "Issues, sir?" she asked.

"It's Carter actually. I haven't seen anything myself, save that one time back at Visegrad. Your performance, in general, has been excellent; there's just been a few times when you've seemed to have… what I'm trying to say is…"

"Spit it out," she muttered under her breath.

"Come again?"

"I didn't say anything."

He sighed. "Look, Six, I have to ask: do you have a history with post traumatic stress?"

She kept her expression blank. "Commander?"

"Carter."

"I've never had a history with PTSD and I would have thought that kind of information would have been in my file anyway."

He looked relieved. "Good. That's settled…"

"Why are you even asking?" He stared back at her. She met his gaze without apprehension. "Who told you anything about me?"

"Nobody told me, Six–"

"You said that you 'heard.' That implies that you had a discussion. Who's talking about me?"

Carter leaned forward onto his elbows. "Six, it doesn't matter if anyone was talking about you. This isn't the time to be angry about things like that; there are more important issues at hand."

"You think I don't know that." She addressed the space between the bottom of his right eye and his cheekbone. "You think that I don't realize what's at stake here?"

"I'll admit that sometimes I have my doubts as to whether or not you take all of this seriously." She didn't say anything in return and he leaned forward even more. "Six, the Covenant is on Reach. This is the biggest… I don't even know what you call it; 'attack' doesn't even begin to describe what's at stake here. And you act like…"

"I act like what?" she demanded.

"You treat this like it's a game," Carter answered frankly. "You act like you're not responsible for the outcomes of your actions because you're not the leader. You don't seem to grasp that there are consequences, dire consequences, to what we do and don't do here, that there are millions of people depending on us. You don't seem to realize that Reach is the last stop before Earth and I don't understand why you don't get it."

"You're insulting me now," Six said flatly.

"I'm not insulting you, Six; I'm telling you the way that people are interpreting your actions. Now if you feel differently–"

"Sir–"

"Please don't call me that."

"Maybe I don't want to call you anything else." She raised her chin. "Now listen up, commander: you can make me do a lot of things because you're my commander and I've got to obey you. But one of the things that you can't make me do, whether you're Carter or Noble Leader, is make me feel anything that I don't want to feel. If I don't feel like you're my friend, then I don't want to be told that you are."

"It isn't a question of 'feeling' anything," he countered evenly. "Personally, I couldn't care less about what you think about me save for the fact that what I'm doing here, what I'm trying to do, is important and you're a part of it whether you like me or not. It's a job that we have to do here, Six, and it's a job that you need to start taking seriously."

She shoved her chair back away from the table with a screech of metal on metal. Folding her arms and wearing an expression akin to any scowl of Emile's, she said, "You think I don't take this seriously. When I was six years old, the Covenant killed my parents in front of me." She felt moisture invade the irises of her eyes and she clenched her jaw, repeating through gritted teeth, "In front of me."

She leapt up to her feet and crossed the room to the right, back toward the window. "It wasn't a clean kill," Six continued, suddenly matter-of-fact. "It wasn't neat and simple, like a blade through the middle or plasma to the skull. They wanted information first from my mother and, since they didn't get it out of my father dying in front of us, they killed her too, took the whole fucking computer, and torched the place. With me inside."

She stared out into the courtyard again, wanting to smash every single ridiculous potted plant as far as the eye could see, and it was only when she heard Carter get up from the table did she move, reaching a hand up to wipe an invisible piece of ash from her forehead. "If only my mother had given them that stupid PIN," she whispered. "We might have made it out. But, no, trying to save humanity, always trying to save humanity, comes first as it always does and always will."

"She probably thought that they would kill all of you anyway."

"And that's supposed to be comforting?" He didn't say anything to that; she grimaced and looked down to see that she had twisted her all of fingers together like what she imagined the inside of a combination lock looked like. Over her shoulder, she said, "Look, I'm sorry about that."

"You apologize a lot, did you know?"

"And I never seem to mean it, do I?" She rubbed her forehead again. "Um, look; I'm for bed. Obviously the 'PTSD' is kicking in again so…"

She moved to flee but Carter was suddenly much closer than he had been before. In a quieter, more sympathetic tone than before, he said, "Did you really think that none of us would understand? You know Jorge's story, I'm sure; what about Emile's? He's an orphan too; all of the members of Alpha Company were. His parents were slaughtered by insurrectionists trying to make a point about liberty. I doubt very much that Jun's told you anything; I don't even pretend to know the full story but it's not pretty."

"And what about you?" she whispered.

He winced. "I suppose you're already aware that I was conscripted at age eleven; that's old for a Spartan-III candidate, even for Alpha. Do you how I managed that? I went to them and I told them that they had to take me in, that I had nowhere else to go. And that was the truth." Carter paused. "Where did you think all of us came from, Six? Did you really think we're so different from you?"

She took a step backward. "I didn't think," she began.

"When do any of us?" was his response and then Carter said, "Get some sleep, Six. It's a big day ahead."

Six nodded almost imperceptibly and then she blurted out, "I am sorry. And… and I mean it this time."

The smile she received in return was warm but not without weight. She walked out into the corridor, waited until she was out of sight, and then broke into a sprint, careful to keep her step light and silent. If she ran, she didn't have to think and she made an entire loop of the second floor before entering the room she shared with Kat.

The other Spartan rolled over in her bunk as Six entered. "Where have you been?"

She yanked back the covers of her own bed. "Talking to the commander."

"Well, what did he want?"

"Wanted to know if I was ready for the mission tomorrow." She fished around in the duffel bag that lay beside her bunk until she found the data pad buried beneath the spare visor she was now careful to keep close. "Do you mind if I have a light on down here?"

"Won't bother me. But don't stay up too late."

"It's morning now," she replied. "I can't stay up any later than I already have."

There was no response. She turned on the data pad and looked for the files listed under "P."

_I am sending back the key  
>that let me into bluebeard's study;<br>because he would make love to me  
>I am sending back the key;<br>in his eye's darkroom I can see  
>my X-rayed heart, dissected body :<br>I am sending back the key  
>that let me into bluebeard's study.<em>

…

All quoted poetry belongs to Sylvia Plath (or did anyway; I'm not sure who owns it now). I claim Fair Use.


	14. To War

**Winterbirth**

_A Halo Reach Fan Fiction by Marianne Bennet_

**A/N**: Eh, this one is a little shorter than the rest but Tip of the Spear was a little hard to divide into manageable pieces. That just means that the next update will come even sooner! I'd like to thank my wonderful reviewers and readers, especially those that have stuck with me from the beginning, as well as my lovely beta-reader **EternalEntity**. Enjoy!

**Fourteen: To War**

_August 12__th__, 2552 _

The wind was kicking up against the plains of the Viery territory but the convoy of Warthogs, Mongooses, and Scorpions moved forward. Sand swirled through the air around the leading Warthog, leaving a sheer layer of dust over the dull red plating of Six's armor. She picked at the decal of her DMR with her thumb, her mind blank. She let the sound of the engines around her overwhelm all other senses.

Beside her, Kat kept two steady hands on the steering wheel and did not look at anything save the open ground in their path. Satisfied that she was paying enough attention to that for the both of them, Six slightly turned her head to the left and employed her peripheral vision to glance up at the Falcon that hovered overhead, keeping up with them as they crossed the plain. She knew Carter was up there and Emile, Jun, and Jorge must be further back in the procession. For once, it was good to know that she wasn't going into this alone; strange comfort, since suddenly it was not only her survival she now feared for.

Carter was calling the shots today, or at least was the one saying what the shots were, so she was being very careful to set aside everything that had happened earlier that morning and how she felt about it. It was something that she could handle later, so long as she came out of today alive and well and in a position to deal with it. Still, she could not help but glance upward and have the sense that he was looking down at her seated in the Warthog below. Or perhaps he was gazing at Kat, riding beside her, instead. She couldn't tell and part of her didn't even want an answer to the question.

Jorge, on the other hand, she had not seen since he had tilted her chin up to look at her, told her that she had pretty eyes, and then left at Carter's request. She suspected that he had been spirited away to another rallying location shortly before Six and Kat had found themselves leading the convoy onward to war. And that was what they all were going; they were going to war.

They were going to war against the Covenant. In a matter of hours, Colonel Holland and Admiral Freemont along with Carter had taken Six and Jun's discovery and designed a counter-assault. Granted, this was an eventuality already predicted, so most of the men and equipment was already at their disposal. But the mere act of putting this all together was something Six could not fathom. She wondered if Carter had gotten any sleep at all last night and regretted having been so confrontational.

Now wasn't the time to dwell on such matters, especially when they were so trivial in the long run. Six was a Spartan. Did Kat think about Carter all of the time?

_What has that got anything to do with me?_ She wondered, fuming at the thought. _Goddamnit, Jennifer._

She stopped. Where had that all come from? Did something happen to her last night? No, nothing happened. _Not really anyway. _She shook her head as though driving off a fly. Next to her in the Warthog, Kat was focused. Up above them, Carter was focused. Goddamnit, _she_ needed to be focused. So Six shoved it all aside and built up the wall again.

Above her, Carter was calling out orders. "_Scorpions, fall back, provide artillery support for the time being. Warthogs, Mongooses, pick up the pace. Command's tagged that landing zone as a Priority One target. Noble Three, have we got the link_?"

Jun's voice crackled in her ear as Kat pushed down on the gas and Six steeled her nerves. The muscles in her shoulders seemed to lock as she took a deep breath. "_The det-charge link is coming in loud and clear._"

"Copy that," said Kat, taking her left hand off of the wheel. "Acquiring signal lock. Pylon detonating in three… two…"

Six didn't see what Kat did next but out of the corner of her eye she saw something flare up on the mountainside. _That was where we were last night, _she realized with a jolt but there was no time to reminisce.

The pylon flared like a beacon, alerting every Banshee, Phantom, Wraith, and Revenant that Six and Jun had seen the night before, right down to the last Grunt. The Banshees swooped down on the convoy like grasping birds of prey; Wraiths rained down mortar from a distance. Out of the corner of her visor, Six saw Carter's Falcon rapidly gain altitude in order to avoid collision.

Kat locked both hands onto the wheel again and swerved left to evade the flaming projectiles. All of the Warthogs kept on course but sped up considerably in an effort to elude the Banshees. It had been Kat's idea: let the Banshees swoop down, Warthogs kick into high gear and the Banshees will pass overhead and directly into the Scorpions' fire range. It might have worked but the timing was off.

Lobs of mortar hit the ground all around the vehicle and Six could do little more than simply keep her head down and shout instructions that Kat did not always choose to follow. "Right!" she yelled as a Banshee dove in an attempt to drop a bomb on top of them. "Left!" she shouted as plasma gleamed like quicksilver overhead. "Left!" she cried out again. "Left, Kat!"

"We're not going left!" she growled in response, her accent never heavier. "That would put us directly in the Wraiths' path, now wouldn't it?"

They veered right and Six, remembering the view from before, spoke up, "Kat, there's a gorge that way."

"There's also a bridge," she replied. "Do we have any Banshees on our tail?"

The gunner answered. "Negative, ma'am, but the bridge looks like a close call."

"It'll hold." She sounded testy. "We're not exactly going with the main force if you haven't noticed."

Six heaved a sigh as they approached the gorge. Kat made for the bridge but a shadow passed overhead as they made their approach. Mortar arced through the perfect blue sky like a silver comet too close for comfort before it came crashing down to earth directly in their path. Kat made a series of sharp turns that took the Warthog and its passengers out of harm's way but then silver streaked the sky once again and Six blinked and the bridge was crumbling down into the gorge before their eyes.

"Kat," she heard herself say. "Kat, the bridge isn't there anymore!"

"I realize that, Six."

"Kat," she said in increasingly panicked tones. "We can't make that jump."

"It's the only way to the AA guns, Six. They're depending on us." Kat reached for the accelerator. "You might want to hold onto something."

Her hands found the edge of the windshield as her feet pressed against the curve where the Warthog's floor met the engine. Kat jammed the accelerator forward and they shot onward toward the destroyed bridge. Her fingers curled around the metal frame of the windshield as she felt the urge to close her eyes and let the world fall away for this moment. But she didn't.

She felt a sickening sense of dread as the Warthog approached the chasm, saw something flicker upon the smooth window of her visor, some scene from the eyes of a girl hiding under a bed, and then another image, this one she remembered well: the smooth ceiling of the room where her augmentation had taken place. Then she was looking down on a familiar Spartan in grey armor splayed spread-eagle against the hot earth and she was wondering whether Marie had died with eyes wide open and if she would die the same and, if so, would anyone come back to close them for her or would her corpse be interred deep beneath the glass when Reach was taken?

They ran out of ground and she felt her heart lift in her chest at the sense of weightlessness. _No, _she told herself in the split second in which the Warthog was airborne. _It's not happening today. I told him it wasn't happening today. _

The landing was hard. It was a credit to Kat's skill that the Warthog didn't flip, that the vehicle landed right side up. No one was initially crushed as a result of their gambit but then the shock of the landing was not entirely absorbed and they bounced.

Six felt her fingers slip from the windshield as she was lifted out of her seat by some unknown force –God, no, physics… maybe. Part of her felt the sudden urge to struggle –to reach out and claw at the windshield, fight back the inevitable, –but another part of Six was content, almost grateful to have her death marked by something out of her hands, something she could have done nothing about. If she was doomed to fail, who could blame her for not trying?

Jorge would. Carter and Kat would probably start swapping the blame for a second dead Number Six but he'd probably think that she just hadn't cared enough to survive. Emile would cuss her out for being an idiot. She already knew what Jun would say – "_There's always a choice._" Noble Team –_her_ team –would blame her.

Her body slammed face first into the ground and felt the oxygen in her lungs whoosh out of her system. She lay there for a moment, silently choking on nothing, all of the fight gone out of her in the instant to be replaced with frightening blankness. There was nothing and then she opened her eyes and the world flickered back into focus.

She blinked the blackness away and registered that she was lying face down in the sandy soil on the other side of the gorge that Kat had decided to jump. Neither Kat, the gunner, nor the Warthog were in sight –the vehicle must have landed somewhere behind her and its other occupants with it. Or perhaps Kat, like she, had been thrown –Six had missed the chasm by yards; perhaps her fellow Spartan had not been so lucky. Six contemplated moving, getting up to her feet maybe, but, even encased in armor, every nerve in her body rebelled. She settled for raising her head and soon wished she hadn't.

Across the chasm, another Warthog was headed fast for the gap. _Don't do it, _she wanted to scream at them. _You'll never make it. Don't do it, don't do it, don't– _

They flew… and then they fell. Screaming. Six closed her eyes again. She hadn't needed that… and yet she had. She had needed something to remind her that some people felt that this war was worth dying for, that she needed to feel that it was worth dying for. Still, had they had to scream like that? She didn't think that she would ever forget the sound.

"Six!" Someone was shouting at her. Did they have to shout in her _ear_? "Six, are you alright? Can you hear me?"

It was Kat. Kat was alive and on her feet; now Six really had to get up. She shoved herself to her knees; every muscle screamed. "Yeah, I'm fine," she groaned, her eyes scanning the area and focusing in on a grenade launcher. That could be useful. Seizing it in her grip, she staggered to her feet. "Fit for action, that's what I am."

Kat was firing at something; why did she have to get the enemy's attention _now_? "I could use some help here, Six!"

"Well, I'm ready." She shoved her magnum back into its holster and heaved a sigh. "Let's go give them hell."


	15. Split Fire

**Winterbirth**

_A Halo Reach Fan Fiction by Marianne Bennet_

**A/N**: For the record, I do know that Kat's a terrible driver. I just think that Carter is worse. XD Sorry there's been such a gap between the last update and this one. I've been writing between packing and… other stuff. I also feel like I need to mention what exactly has been giving me inspiration for this whole series: Eminem and Florence + the Machine. Strange combination, right? But I find it suits me.

I'd like to thank my wonderful reviewers and readers as well as my lovely beta-reader **EternalEntity**. Enjoy!

**Fifteen: Split Fire**

_August 12__th__, 2552 _

Adrenaline pumped through her veins like drug as Six sprinted out of the doomed structure, stolen plasma pistol loose in her grip. She had fried the AA gun's core only moments before and the last thing she wanted was to get caught in the inevitable explosion.

Kat did not sound happy as she called over the comm., "_Six, you need to get a safe distance away before that thing blows._"

"I'm running," she answered between breaths. Around her, the dust kicked up by the battle was beginning to settle but Six knew better than to relax.

"_Then run faster._"

Kat's advice was _not _helpful but Six did not say anything to that effect as she lunged forward and leapt off of the miniature mesa upon which the AA gun stood. She hit the ground running, her heavy boots pounding out a steady rhythm as she sprinted toward the Rocket Warthog that she and Kat had commandeered from its previous owners: a trio of UNSC troopers. They had surrendered their vehicle with little fuss, albeit some disgruntled grumbling amongst themselves. Six didn't blame them but the two Spartans had needed a means of transportation and there one had been, conveniently placed for the taking.

She leapt into the driver's seat and pressed her foot to the gas. Behind them, the AA gun was racked by one interior exposition after another as the core began to overload. Once they had driven what Six gauged to be a "safe distance," she allowed the engine to stall, lingering to observe the results of her handiwork. With a contented smirk, she watched as the structure imploded.

Six wasn't the only one who was satisfied by this development. "_Control, 2 Lima 4: permission to commence bombing runs, heading 224.6, over._"

Shadows passed overhead: the frigates _Saratoga _and _Grafton _had arrived, escorted by a trio of Longswords. Six smiled at their approach toward the besieged valley below and Carter's voice filled her ears: "_Good work, Noble Six. UNSC air support: skies are clear. You are clear for bombing run._"

She smiled at his praise of her too, though she would never admit such a thing within anyone's earshot, least of all his. And yet, would it be such a terrible thing if he knew what she liked in him and the little things he could do to make her like him even more?

_Yes,_ she decided almost immediately. _A very bad thing. A very, very bad thing. Why are you thinking of that and with Kat here sitting next to you?_

"_Copy. 2 Lima 4, bombing run, heading 224.6, Permission has been granted - out._"

Six decided to distract herself by watching the bombing down in the valley. Nothing worked as well to that purpose than watching big explosions and the enemy dying. The enemy dying at a distance was even better. She didn't have to see the blood or hear the screams…

The Scarabs crumpled in the valley beneath the Grafton and Saratoga's bombardment. Longswords hovered above, discouraging any Covenant air support from aiding the ground forces. Six's lips curved in a smile. This was the product of _her _efforts; bringing death and destruction to the Covenant would be _her _legacy. She couldn't think of any better way to serve and honor humanity. And yet…

_I did this, _Six told herself again. _I did this and, Goddamnit, I'll be proud of it. I just need something else to do._

"How are you doing over there, Six?"

She blinked at Kat's inquiry. "I'm fine," she answered automatically. "And you?"

"I'm… excited," replied Kat after a moment's thought. "I know it makes me sound green, but this is the first time I've been a major player in something so big. It's rather exhilarating. I doubt the feeling will last, however."

_It doesn't, _she realized with a start. _Or, rather, it didn't for me. _But Six merely pursed her lips and said nothing in return.

"_Noble Two, Noble Six, there's a mining facility near your location,_" Six had never been more relieved to hear her commander's voice.

She jumped to answer. "What's so special about it?" She thought she saw Kat shoot her a look.

"_Only that the Covenant are using it as a Command outpost. Troopers on site have already engaged but I'm sure they can use some help. It's on the way to Six's rendezvous point for the spires, Kat._"

"Copy that," Kat replied. "Coordinates received. Go that way, Six."

Six followed instructions. Letting the wheel spin beneath her grip as they turned, she asked, "We're taking down the spires today?"

"We've got to see where we're fighting, don't we? You and Jorge will handle it, or so I've been told." They continued to roll forward, encountering little resistance. As Six took the time to roll the Warthog's wheels over a pair of skirmishers, Kat added, "But we're getting ahead of ourselves. One thing at a time and we'll start with that mining facility."

The UNSC troopers at the near side of the bridge were in trouble. They were too closely locked in combat with the Covenant soldiers for Kat to fire the turret at the enemy; once shot, a weapon could not distinguish friend from foe. Recognizing this issue, Six leapt from the driver's seat and sprinted along the canyon's edge, assault rifle in hand, as Kat turned her gun toward the enemy on the far side of the gorge.

Six took aim at a cluster of blue and red shields. The rifle's trigger was hot beneath her gloved fingertips as she pulled back on it, unleashing a flurry of regimented shots at the enemy. The jackals' shields withstood the Spartan's onslaught but Six and Kat's appearance had given the tired UNSC troopers new drive to push back the enemy. The soldiers rushed forward across the bridge like some vengeful swell of the ocean and Six was in the thick of it. It was like she was everywhere at once, one moment driving her knife through the skin beside a grunt's collarbone, the next shoving a jackal off of the bridge and down into the gorge below. Thrusting her knife back into her belt, she smacked another grunt upside the head with the butt of her rifle, leaving it dazed in her wake, an easy kill for a lesser soldier.

It was like her sole goal in life had become to bring the entire Covenant to their knees as Six rushed forward across the bridge and slashed the blade of her knife against a lone skirmisher's torso. She finished up with a clean stab and then pushed the corpse aside in disgust. The body fell forward onto the ground as one of the troopers cried out, "There!"

She looked up, squinting against the sun. Further up in the mining facility's skeletal structure… was that? No, it couldn't be. And yet they said this was a command outpost…

The alien darted back into the shadows of the facility as Six raised her weapon's scope to her eye. With a sigh, she lowered her rifle. There was no use in immediate pursuit; the elite… whatever it was would already be well into the facility by now and behind a series of fortifications and defenses, Six was sure. She turned toward the soldier that had alerted her to the elite's presence.

"Corporal Sommers with 4 Omega," he said by way of an introduction. "We're ready to follow you into the facility, ma'am, whenever you're ready."

"Are you the leader here?"

A rueful smile twisted his features. "Well, I am now. Didn't have much of a choice in the matter but I'll do whatever has to be done."

Corporal Sommers was nursing an injury –moderately severe, Six's brain classified the plasma burns running up and down the left side of the corporal's torso. She handed him one of her emergency medical packs and only stopped to wonder why she did such a thing when the parcel was already in the wounded man's hand.

"Thank you, ma'am," he said.

"What was that up there?" she wanted to know.

"That's why we're here," Sommers answered. Out of the corner of her eye, Six saw Kat running across the bridge. "We were just about to alert Command that we'd spotted it when you two showed up. It's an Elite Zealot that we're dealing with here."

Six blinked and then lifted a hand up toward her comm. "Commander, did you get all that? The mining facility's harboring an Elite Zealot."

"A Zealot?" It was Kat, coming up behind the UNSC troopers. "Are you certain, Corporal?"

"Positive, ma'am."

"Then this is something big."

"_There are still bigger fish to fry here, Kat, Six,_" Carter was finally responding. "_Take out the Zealot if you can but keep moving. Both of you. We need to deal with those spires pronto._"

"Understood, commander," answered Kat, jamming a fresh magazine into her magnum. "Corporal, are you planning on following us in?"

He stood a little taller at her attention. "Whatever works best for you, ma'am. A few of my men are in condition to fight."

"And the others?"

"I suppose they can wait here until we can secure a landing zone," replied Sommers. "We're ready when you are."

Six glanced at Kat. "We're ready as we'll ever be," Six drawled out her words. "Anyone got a DMR they want to lend me?"

Moments later, she found herself armed with a dead man's weapon and her pockets loaded with borrowed magazines. Sommers rallied the troopers of 4 Omega; Six noticed with amusement that the corporal kept glancing over his shoulder for Kat's nod of approval. She shot Kat a faint smile, remembered too late that no one could see it, and then started up the walkway with confidence that Kat, Sommers, and the rest would follow in the attack.

A quartet of armed skirmishers awaited them. Sommers lobbed a grenade in their general direction but it didn't stick and all four enemies were able to evade the blast. Kat started forward, magnum in hand, and attempted a series of headshots. Only one skirmisher fell but Kat never faltered, reloading her gun with mechanical efficiency. By that time, the rest of 4 Omega that was still on their feet–an abysmally small group of three troopers –had caught up to their leader and the Spartans.

One of the Omega troopers had better aim than his acting leader; his plasma grenade latched on to one Skirmisher's shoulder. He shouted in triumph but his luck ran out fast. The skirmisher swatted at the grenade but the explosive was firmly lodged between its shoulder and chest plates. Six was about to smile –the Covenant's weapons turned against them –but then the alien ran at the trooper, grabbing the man about the waist as it rushed forward, and both toppled over the platform's railing and into the canyon below.

_Is that what happens? _Thought Six dimly. _Humanity and the Covenant both trying to fight each other off and then both are destroyed? Is that what's going to happen with me and Carter if we don't try and find some common ground to stand on? _

"I'm not seeing the target," said Kat, breathless from the fight, standing beside a still alive Corporal Sommers and the last of his men.

"_Eyes on the prize, Kat; we have other issues to deal with,_" Carter reminded her, hearing her comment.

"Why is it so important to get this Zealot anyway?" asked Six, wiping the blade of her knife off on her thigh. "It's just one alien."

"How many Elite Zealots do you think they deploy to one planet, Six? I don't want another lecture from the doctor next I see her," she answered derisively. "Come on, corporal. I say we go further in."

Six raised an eyebrow. They both knew that it wouldn't be either of them that'd be blamed for letting the Zealot get away a second time. Halsey already had a bone to pick with Noble Leader. So it was Carter's pride that Kat was trying to protect by taking out the Zealot. That made more sense to Six than it didn't and, as she followed Kat and the surviving members of 4 Omega deeper into the mining complex, she decided that she would contest the issue no further.

She dropped her assault rifle in favor of a dead skirmisher's weapon and Six loaded her pockets with needles as they continued further into the facility, all eyes looking for one Zealot. _Trying to find a needle in a haystack_… there wasn't anything soft in the world of a Spartan, only pointy, prickly emotions that stabbed and jabbed and made you feel alive in the end if you lived through it, emotions like anger and grief... and longing for something else.

Grunts were easy to find; they always came running at you, one way or another. They ran forward toward Kat, Six, and the troopers now; Six wondered idly as she planted a bullet in one assailant's head if they got some kind of high out of running toward their death. They must know that they're doing just that as they start sprinting toward a Spartan; Spartans and death are one and the same.

She twisted her knife between the ribs of a jackal, felt the tension between metal and bone, and then flowed around the soon-to-be corpse like a stream around a stone, moving onto another enemy. The second jackal's jaw slammed down onto the metal floor when her knife was finished with it; Six stepped delicately like a dancer over its corpse as blood dripped through the perforated flooring. She wondered if there was a river down deep in the canyon and, if so, would it run red when she was done with this place?

Six turned a corner, looked down the corridor, and saw only white. She jerked back into cover just in time, heart pounding, very conscious of the fact that she had nearly lost her head to an elite on a plasma turret, and hissed, "What the hell are we going to do about that?"

Corporal Sommers's mouth was set in a determined line. "Me and my men can go out and divert the turret while the two of you go in and kill the bastard."

"That's suicide and we're not about to let you do that," replied Kat firmly. "Noble Six and I will handle this one. You and your men keep back."

There was a moment when Six thought that Sommers was going to object, refuse, throw his life away for the sake of refusing to admit that the Spartans could do the job better. It was something that Six could even see herself doing. But then Sommers nodded his agreement, gestured his man back from the doorway, and she thought him the better man for it.

"Alright, Kat," she said. "You're the great tactician. What's our plan?"

"Our armor and shields can take more hits than theirs can from that thing," Noble's other female Spartan replied. "We go in heavy and we take it out."

"We're still not invincible."

"I never suggested such a thing," Six could hear Kat smile. "But what more is there to it than to go in shooting? You go left, I'll take right. That's all of the strategy you'll get out of me today."

They turned the corner. Six hugged the wall; Kat traced the open platform's edge with careful steps. The elite on the turret had no choice but to split its fire between the two of them, creating a gap between each shot that both Six and Kat employed to run forward and dodge the shots. There was one moment when plasma caught Six's foot but it did little damage in truth and she only ran faster.

Before she knew it and certainly before the elite knew it, she was behind the turret and behind the assailant perched upon it. Knife in hand, she jammed the weapon into the gap between ribs, grazing the alien's curved spine with the edge of the blade, and savored the slow twist of the wrist that ended a life.

Corporal Sommers and his men rushed through the entrance when the fire ceased. They watched as Six wiped her palm free of blood against the wall. "Was that the Zealot?" Sommers asked, a hopeful note in his voice.

"Unfortunately, no," answered Kat, yanking the turret free of its base. She pushed it into the corporal's hands. "You'll need this."

He gazed at her in obvious admiration; Six tried not to laugh. "Yes, ma'am." He braced the heavy weapon against his knee; what was a simple thing to carry for someone like Jorge or even Kat was a burden for a normal soldier but Sommers bore the weight well.

"Zealot," Six reminded Kat and the other Spartan nodded. They moved forward, taking the lead deeper into the complex and then Six saw it loitering in another doorway across an open area that smoked with plasma burns, caught in the act of running away.

The Zealot bared its teeth in a snarl that Six returned, lips curving in a feral grin no one could see. Her frame bent into a predator's slight crouch, ready to spring, as the alien dropped down into the open space between Six, Kat, and 4 Omega and the exit out of the facility. Its eyes were fixed on Six; she wondered if it remembered her. She remembered it.

_Her back slammed down into the metal floor, helmeted head snapped back and yet the ground. She screwed up her fist for a second punch and then its weight was lifted from her. She looked up at blue armor; she had never begrudged a rescuer so much…_

_Look at you, _Six thought to herself sardonically. _Actually remembering something semi-useful. But Carter's not here to save you this time. Stay sharp. _

It ran forward, a rush of orange crossing the plasma scarred ground, and Six stepped left as Kat shoved the troopers back into the doorway. The alien growled, turning its gaze upon Six again. She took needle rifle in hand and shifted her weight to her left foot, ready to sprint if the Zealot decided to try and rush her again.

"You fight us with our own weapons," it growled, taking her by surprise. "Foolish human."

Her heart jolted at the sound of an alien voice speaking a human tongue but steeled her nerves. "I use whatever weapons suit me," she said but the Spartan calm she employed now sounded false even to her own ears. "And I'm a weapon too."

It sneered at this response. "Foolish again," it said and then drew an energy sword. "I've seen you fight. You like your knives, human?" He activated the hilt and the shining blade burst forth from his hand. "So do I." And then it charged.

The blade curved over her, glimmering in the sunlight, cutting an arc where her neck had been moments before. She ducked beneath the swoop of silver and shot one, two needles into the Zealot's stomach. The shots bounced off its shields and it laughed. "You truly know nothing of our weapons."

"I can drive a Wraith," she muttered under her breath. She took the opportunity to dart under its outstretched arm, sprinting to the center of the space.

"Six!" It was Kat, running back through the doorway. Magnum in hand, she pumped bullet after bullet into the Zealot. Its shields flickered. Six inched along the perimeter, her attacker's attention diverted by Kat's arrival.

Sommers appeared, plasma turret braced against his thigh. The corporal unleashed the white fire upon the Zealot to little avail; the alien lunged forward and tossed the soldier into the wall where the man crumpled under the weight of the turret like a ragdoll against the rubble. Still, its shields flickered.

The Zealot advanced on Kat; it seemed to have forgotten Six in the process of dealing with Sommers. Kat's fingers never left the trigger of her favorite magnum, the alien was laughing, and then Six launched herself forward across the open space.

She latched onto the enemy's back and vaguely remembered the skirmisher leaping onto Jorge's shoulders back at Visegrad. She locked her arms around the Zealot's neck, pushing its throat into the crook of her elbow, whispered, "I don't need knives," and then she snapped the bone.

Six let herself fall back to the ground with the Zealot. When she was certain it was dead beneath her fingertips, she allowed Kat to pull her up to her feet. The other Spartan stared at her for a moment and then said, "Commander, high value target has been neutralized."

"_Good job, both of you._" He paused. "_Are you alright?_"

"He means you, Six." There was something in Kat's voice as she said this, some edge that Six couldn't quite name.

"I'm fine," she said, wiping a gloved hand across her visor. Her fingers left a trail of blood in their wake so she rubbed at that too. "Why wouldn't I be?"

"_Just…_" he hesitated. "_ONI wants close up recon of those Spires. Jorge is coming for you with a Falcon at these coordinates. You need to get there fast._"

"Understood," answered Kat. "We'll be the ones in… I'm not sure what we'll be in. Come on, Six."

She glanced back at where Corporal Sommers was crumpled against the wall. Kat followed her gaze. "He's dead, lieutenant."

"Well, that was the end of him," she said, careful to keep her tone emotionless. She remembered the admiration with which he had gazed up at Kat.

"Yes, it was," Kat replied shortly. "Moving on."

She leapt down through a hole into a lower room. Six waited a moment before following, told herself to stop looking back, and then dropped down too.


	16. Expendable

**Winterbirth**

_A Halo Reach Fan Fiction by Marianne Bennet_

**A/N**: I'm sorry! I know! A lot came up in life and then this was a tricky chapter in its own right. But things have calmed down, I'm settled into a cubby-hole of a room, and I can get back on track. Again, I'd like to thank my wonderfully patient reviewers –especially Wolf, whose review reminded me that I needed to turn my attention back to Six's story –and readers as well as my lovely beta-reader **EternalEntity**. Enjoy!

**Sixteen: Expendable**

_August 12__th__, 2552 _

Jorge's Falcon was late. Kat was livid.

Six was tugging at the unraveling mesh of her right glove as she sat in the commandeered Revenant's passenger seat, listening to the engine stall, as Kat paced about the appointed landing zone. _If she keeps up that same circuit long enough, _thought Six idly to herself, _she'll wear a hole in the ground and we can make it a monument. But we'll have to save the planet first. Not even a mountain will last long beneath the glass._

"What do you mean he and Jun were stalled?" Kat was saying into her comm. "They weren't even supposed to be doing much of anything. Whose fault is this?"

"_It's nobody's fault,_" Carter was trying to calm her down. "_Nobody could've predicted that the Covvies would have a couple of extra teams left over to flank us. But I can't smooth your feathers now, Kat. Jorge will be on his way as soon as we can get him off the ground._"

Kat made a little huff of exasperation as soon as she heard the audible click of disconnection. "And what does he expect us to get done in the meantime? There aren't many Spartans on the ground to begin with and here are the two of us, sitting around, doing nothing."

"There are too many variables in play for this all to go off without a hitch," replied Six, narrowing her eyes in frustration. One of the strands of her illegally long hair had fallen in front of her eyes and, with helmet in place, there was no way to do anything about it. "This is why I don't like big-scale operations."

"So this is your 'Lone Wolf Disorder' acting up again?" asked Kat wryly.

"So is _that_ what he calls it now?" She tried blowing the hair up and back into place but all that accomplished was filling the comm. with the noise of her own breathing. "Clever man, that Carter is."

"Some people seem to think so," replied Kat evenly, leaning against the Revenant's hull and rubbing her thumb against the barrel of her favored magnum.

"And you don't?"

"This is a _very_ strange place to be attempting to have girl talk, lieutenant. Let me make it clear that I'm not interested in engaging."

"Crystal," responded Six coolly. "You were in Beta Company too, right?"

"I remember you, if that's what you're trying to ask."

Six was taken aback. "I…" she started and then stopped and then began again. "I wouldn't expect you to have."

"There aren't very many numbers between 312 and 320. I remember you well enough."

"I can count well enough," she retorted. "I don't really remember anybody from back then."

"Not even that girl who died in the training simulation with you?"

The wisp of red hair fell flat on Six's nose. "No." She remembered grey armor that hadn't really counted for anything in the end. They all had zero protection from the things that can bite you from the inside. "So she did die."

"I saw them take her body out," Kat confirmed matter-of-factly. "I was very good at hijacking the locks on the dorms from the inside. They screwed up something in her augmentation, I heard. Needle punctured the aorta in just the wrong way. Glitch in the simulation program on top of that. Organ failure under too much stress."

Something cold clenched around the excuse of an organ that Six told herself she had for a heart. She felt her jaw unhinge like rusty machinery as she said, "Was that it? They never said."

"Apparently," Kat cracked open a panel on the Revenant's hood, examining its Covenant-designed engine within with visible interest. "Where do you think the sparking mechanism is in this piece of junk?"

Six's finger hovered over the ignition. "Do you want me to turn on the engine and we can both find out?"

"And melt my helmet while you're at it? I think not." She slammed the panel shut. "I only looked because I noticed the balance was off while we were driving. Did you?"

"I only noticed that we were moving forward. That's all I cared about anyway." She tilted her head back and scanned the skies for Jorge's Falcon. "Why do you think the commander hates me?"

"Good God," Kat growled and then slapped her hand down on her cuff to activate her comm. Interest piqued, Six decided to discreetly listen in on the channel. "Noble Leader, Two and Six are _still_ requesting airlift out of here. Should I resend the coordinates to Jorge?"

"_He's already headed your way. Patience, Kat._"

Kat shot a furtive glance in Six's direction and then, in a lower voice, as if that would make any difference, she replied, "I can only take so many Emile-types. One on the team was pushing it already."

"_She's not like Emile._"

"If you say so, commander. Noble Two out."

"And here I was thinking that, of everyone on Noble Team, you and I might get along." Six sighed audibly. "Pity. I thought we might have bonded over being female."

There was a scowl in Kat's tone. "That and Beta Company is where our similarities end. I find it difficult to 'get along' with anyone who shows an active disregard for their commander."

"That's got nothing to do with Carter being in an authority position," responded Six, equally frosty. "It's about Carter being Carter and we both know it."

The silence –an empty sound like a gun fully loaded and cocked for the next shot –was shattered by the blades of a Falcon whipping through the air above. Jorge's friendly voice crackled in Six's ear; the noise was welcome: "_Need a lift, Spartan?_"

The vehicle descended on the clearing, sending the dust around the Revenant into a frenzy, coating Six with a second shell. Kat's turquoise armor was dulled by the dirt as had her tongue by Jorge's arrival. She said nothing as her fellow female comrade leapt from the purloined Covenant vehicle and crossed the gap in five long strides.

"You're quiet, Kat," Jorge observed once Six had seated herself opposite him in the Falcon. "Something up?"

"I've…" Kat hesitated. Six felt guilt twist her throat. "I've a lot to think about," Noble Team's lieutenant commander finally said. "And you have to get to Spire One before the Grafton's done in the valley."

"Can't have it sitting around doing nothing," Jorge agreed. "We'd better get on it."

Six felt her joints relax just as they took flight and Jorge said, "Don't get too comfortable, Six. We'll need you in that turret soon enough."

"Can't I get a moment's peace?" she replied irritably. "If it isn't this ridiculousness revolving around me and the commander, it's the bloody Covenant."

"I see you're picking up some of my habits," Jorge chuckled in return. "I can't tell the Covvies to take a hike but I might have some advice for that first problem: Try remembering that we're all on the same side here."

"Are we? I couldn't tell."

"Those Wraiths down there aren't proof enough?" He jerked his head to her left. "Get in the turret. Shooting a big gun always make me feel better."

…

Perhaps she had been too tired, a delayed casualty of the previous night's mission. Maybe her mind had been distracted, too focused on the inner tribulations of her team and not alert enough when it came to the task at hand. Either way, as the Falcon tumbled though thin air to the water's edge below, Six was well aware of the fact that it was _her _fault.

Jorge didn't seem to blame her as they fell, their gloved hands grappling at something to hold onto –but then, did Jorge ever really blame anyone? He blamed the Covenant but he never seemed to hold a grudge against one of his own for very long, not even when it came to Emile, not even when it came to Six. Did he simply choose, then, to give a free ride to people who had faces and names? That didn't seem like Jorge either and besides: B312 wasn't a name nor was her helmet a face. Spartans-IIIs –especially those of Alpha Company like Jun, Emile, and Carter –had been created to be expendable super soldiers. Perhaps Jorge didn't hold judgment over anyone because he figured that they hadn't got long to live anyway. If they did something grievously wrong, he'd spare them his wrath, figuring that they'd have to put up with the anger of whatever else was out there soon enough.

That was the only reasoning Six could come up with for why he wasn't screaming bloody murder at her as they toppled to the shoreline. She knew she would have been, should their places had been exchanged and yet… it seemed that she could not envision herself yelling at Jorge. No matter how hard she tried, the images would not come to her head, the words lingered in her throat. It was far easier to be furious with Carter, even if her commander had truly done nothing wrong. And, for some reason, that made Jorge even more unapproachable than Noble Leader. Anger she could deal with, match, and reciprocate; this something else… not so much.

The Falcon hit the ground and not the water –for that, Six should have been grateful. There were a lot of things she should be grateful for but Six never did feel the urge to count her blessings. She was thrown forward, out of the turret and into the waves, slamming facedown into the earth for the second time that day.

For a moment, she felt nothing –a strange feeling to describe –and then Six became dimly aware of the water lapping over her armored body. After another moment or maybe another eternity, full consciousness powered up with her shield and then she felt someone haul her back onto her feet.

"Up you go, Six," said Jorge as he guided her back to shore, one hand placed firmly on her shoulders, vaguely reminiscent of the way a cat carries a kitten by the scruff of the neck. "I told you to lock your armor, didn't I?"

"I did," she mumbled in protest as she stumbled across the rocky beach, her limbs still a tad out of phase by the crash. "I got thrown."

"Sure you did."

She looked up at him with suspicion. "Why weren't you thrown out of the thing too? Kat was when we crashed the Warthog earlier."

"Because I've probably got twice the weight on either of you?" he replied wryly. "So you crashed the Hog too. I didn't hear about it."

"Yeah, I'm just bad luck like that," Six retorted and stood up a little straighter, shrugging away his hand. "I'm fine. I was just a little shaken at first."

"You sure?" Jorge sounded skeptical.

"Don't get like that on me now." She looked toward the crash and sifted through the wreckage until she recovered a handful of magazines that must have tumbled from her belt and then looked up toward the beachhead. "We need to get to that spire while we're still of use to somebody."

"I just wanted to make sure you're alright."

"Being alright isn't the objective." Words filled her mouth; she wasn't sure if she could control them anymore. She tried to swallow down the bitterness but it spilled out anyway. "It's the never the objective. Getting the mission does is. Everything else –everyone else –is expendable."

"You don't really believe that."

"Yes." Six turned toward the path. "That's the way it's got to be. We can't care about anything else, not here, not now, because if we do the Covenant gets the planet and we're dead anyway."


	17. Sinking Ship

**Winterbirth**

_A Halo Reach Fan Fiction by Marianne Bennet_

**A/N**: Sorry! Again! I've been really busy lately. I basically wrote this chapter in movie theater hallways and during long car rides. But my inspiration seems to have returned, which is good because I was beginning to get worried. Truly, I feel as though I've done better writing in that hallway than any I've done in the last four weeks (although, I'm not sure how I feel about the end of this chapter. Thoughts?). Thank you's to my readers, reviewers, and loyal beta-reader **EternalEntity**. Enjoy!

**Seventeen: Sinking Ship**

_August 12__th__, 2552 _

The dome enclosing the spire crackled an electric shade of blue. Jagged white lines crisscrossed down the curve of the shield, inviting the mind to make a puzzle out of the certainty of a blue sky. Six found herself pausing to take notice of the colors as she and Jorge entered the battlefield. "Come on, Six," the elder Spartan said as he hiked past her. "No stopping to think."

"If only that were possible," she found herself replying. She craned her neck back to gaze to the point of the ominous structure that lay before them. "God, that's high up."

"And that's where you're headed. Don't tell me you've got a fear of heights now."

"No," she lied quickly. And then because if she'd already lied once, she might as well go for the full count: "I'm not afraid of anything."

The ensuing silence informed her of his doubt. "If you say so," he replied and then allowed the issue to drop. "Some of the Covvies that were supposed to be defending the spire have been removed, drawn west by our Scorpions. It didn't work quite as well as the commander would have liked but I told him we could handle it. See anything down there to give you pause?"

Six lifted her DMR's scope to her helmet's visor and quickly scanned the area. "I'm more worried about what's up in that tower. They wouldn't leave it to grunts to man that thing."

"You'll have to think fast," Jorge agreed. "But let's focus on getting you up there first."

"If," her gaze lingered on the spire's base. "If you can divert those jackals from the northern edge of the field, I can use my camo to get in close and flank them. Plus I'll bet they've got something in that opening by the elevators. I don't think that a Wraith could fit but maybe a Revenant. A Ghost at the least. Maybe two. If you can get me in there, I can nip that problem in the bud."

"Huh," he considered this. "Sounds doable. To be honest, Six, I never figured you to be one for strategy."

"I don't think that many people ever really figure Spartans to be anything besides super soldiers," she shrugged. "But I suppose that phrase is pretty broadly used. We can be a lot of things."

"Well, we weren't really raised to have social skills; that's for certain. But that's enough talking. We've got a job to do."

What a curious thing, that it was suddenly someone else telling Six to move on, to return to the task at hand. _It's usually me. Huh. Funny. _But, no matter who did say it, it was true enough. That spire needed to come crashing down to the desert floor and, if it was her plan they were going to use, Six had better start playing her part.

She slapped her palm down against the right side of her belt and watched her legs dissolve into the sand and brush around her knees. Grinding the toe of her now camouflaged boot into the dirt, she waited for the little ping that would inform her that the camo had taken hold and watched as Jorge detached superfluous elements of his machine gun, collapsed them into manageable sizes, and stored them in his various pockets. "How did this happen?" she wondered aloud. "We seemed to be doing so well before."

"How does any war happen?" Jorge asked grimly, attaching an extra magazine to his belt. She checked herself, realizing with a start that he had followed her train of thought exactly. "The Covenant decides they want something. They come to take it. Never mind whoever had been there before."

"But why hate humanity?" That was the part Six didn't get. "They've adopted enough alien races; why didn't they do the same with us?"

"You and Jun should really sit down and talk about that. I think you have more in common than you think."

"Is that so?" she asked, her tone just short of mocking.

"You asked me why I think the Covenant hates humanity or why humanity hates the Covvies. It works both ways." Jorge sounded thoughtful. "Someone made a bad first impression at some point and then someone made a bad second impression and it just grew from there. How else does a conflict begin? But, again, enough talking about things we can't do anything about, Six. We need to get to work."

"I'm ready when you are," Six answered curtly and let herself skid down the slope, leaving only a dusty trail to mark where she had been before. She landed lightly on her feet at the base of the incline and took off running, taking care to keep her steps muted. She couldn't do much about the dirt she kicked up but hopefully there was enough residue floating about to keep her arrival disguised. Crossing the open ground between the hillside and the spire's base, Six could hear the jackals and grunts jabbering, maybe arguing about something; how could she tell? She pressed her back into the wall and let their chatter fill her ears, waiting for the sound of bullets.

A moment passed and Six's patience was rewarded. A good thing it was only a moment's wait; she had never had much patience to begin with and Spartan adrenaline would never compensate that department. Shots clinked against the wall like hail and the jackals were diverted by the fire, allowing her to skirt around the wall's edge and duck into the open passage in the spire's base she had mentioned before. The area was empty –well, mostly empty and whatever enemies remained Six's DMR made short work of.

Blood was splattered across her visor; not her own, thank God or whatever was out there, but that of an unnamed enemy that had gotten too close for either of their comfort. She had just rubbed her wrist against the front of her helmet, staining the plating with a darker crimson –_easier to think of it as a color than know it for what it really is; it keeps the Spartan charade strong_ – when the buzzing of an engine filled her ears and she knew within the moment that she might have just been caught in her own web.

_If I don't move, it's going to run me over. _Her gaze was glued to the Revenant lurking in the entranceway of the spire's ground level. Its engine continued to stall; perhaps the elite in the driver's seat was contemplating the sight of her hesitating in its path. Six was frozen. Whether she moved right or left, there was no way save melting into the wall itself she could avoid being crushed. There was no possibility of outrunning the vehicle either. _If you're going to run me over, run me over already. I don't like to wait._

She watched as the elite ran his palm against the steering controls. Perhaps it was savoring the moment. She was too, though in a different sense. But why was there such a difference between the moment one ends a life and the moment one's life is ended? They were two sides to the same coin; her father used to flip an ancient quarter to make decisions; being a woman of science, it irked her mother to no end. _Enough of that. _

Here she was, standing and doing nothing and refusing to take her own life into her hands. Why couldn't she make her legs move, run to the right, run away, duck into that elevator, do _something _to prove that she believed that she was worth a chance at survival? She told herself that surviving was what counted and that she had to make sure that the members of her new team thought she was worth saving. If she didn't believe she was worth it, who would?

The elite continued to stare her down, probably just as confused as to why she wasn't trying to save herself. And why wasn't she running away? Did she want to die? Had she always wanted to die? Had dying been her goal since the age of six? _No. I want to live. All that I've done has been to make sure that I live. But what does that even mean?_

It meant that she needed to make a choice. And she did. She ran forward, building up momentum, her pace keeping time with the pounding of adrenaline in her ears. Two yards from the Revenant's hood, she leapt into the air, her back arching, her hands grasping at something to hold onto as she landed on the hood, her legs scrambling for a foot hold. The sound of her armor crashing against the vehicle was tremendous; the elite's torso jerked backward in surprise and then she was climbing, digging her fingers into the ridges of the hull, clawing her way toward survival. Her fingers reached for the enemy's throat, stretching through thin air, and then she was there, its life pulsing in her hand, survival in reach. She wrapped her arm about the alien's head, placed her palm gently across its mouth as though silencing a child, and jerked right. She had never savored the snap more.

Six crouched on the hood for a few moments, feeling the enemy's pulse die between her fingers, and was only woken by Jorge's voice in her ear: "_Whatever's up there called for reinforcements. Carter's coming but that shield has to be down before he gets here. Are you there? Six?_"

"I'm here." The words had never come clearer, stronger, no longer dragged from her throat. She leapt lightly from the hood and crossed the space between the Revenant and the beam of blue light that served as elevator. She passed a gloved hand through the glow and then stepped in, felt the blueness encase her from head to toe and then lift her upward. "And I'm on my way up. Tell the commander he has nothing to worry about."

"_We all know that's a losing battle._" It was Carter himself now, his voice wry but also energized, as though he too could finally feel the victory just within reach. "_Get it done and we can all go home._"

"_Card game when this is all done, Carter?_" She imagined Jorge waiting down on the ground with little to do save plan Noble Team's ensuing celebration, a celebration that Six would get to be a part of, once her duty here was done. She smiled at the thought while her stomach squirmed at the drop below her.

"_I'll take a rain check. Once this is all done, we'll see._" Carter sounded as though he was smiling too; why were they all grinning like idiots? This wasn't over; were they all so certain that she could get the job done? Did they not know how close she had been to death only moments before? She immediately shook her head at her own naiveté. She should know better than most that death around the corner was merely a typical hazard in their line of work.

This was her stop. The spire's control room came into view and Six found herself stepping out of the elevator beam. Her stomach rolled over again as she glanced through an open archway onto the view and, more terrifyingly, the drop. Hopefully, she would be able to control the battlefield and keep the fighting to the interior. She didn't want to end up in a scrap out on that open platform; that was for certain.

There were three grunts in her line of sight. She pulled the trigger three times, watched the holes appear in their foreheads without pause. She braced herself for whatever would come next; gunfire would not go unnoticed in such a small field. But no enemy immediately appeared. Six waited one moment and then another and then decided that most of the elites must have been drawn away by the distraction Jorge had mentioned. _Convenient._ Somewhat reassured, Six went looking for the shield controls.

She found them arrayed out with a dozen other buttons and switches and screens all on one panel in the center of room. _Hell, this is Kat's thing, not mine. _She scanned the various controls, searching for anything that might give her a hint of what exactly she was looking at. "Commander, help me out here. I'm not a techie."

"_There should be a master switch on the left side of the control panel._" Were all the members of Noble Team insufferable eavesdroppers? At least Kat didn't sound as though she was smiling.

"You want me to shut it all down?"

"_Shut it all down,_" Carter confirmed. "_And do it quick, lieutenant. I can't get you out of there if that shield is still up._"

"Done." She slapped her palm down on what could only be the master switch, listened to the station power down around her, watched as the crackling blue shield outside the windows flickered into nothingness. "Five and Six ready for extraction, commander."

"_We're picking up Jorge first. Sit tight, lieutenant._"

"Wouldn't do otherwise." The view was making a part of herself that she thought she had sealed off very nervous. She closed her eyes very tightly, then opened them, and made herself face away from the open archway. "Let me know when you get here." Her stomach was turning somersaults up between her ribs. "No hurry."

"_Is something going on up there that you're not telling us about, Six?_"

"No–"

And then she was slammed facedown against the floor, her head snapping up in the momentum, chin pressed against the ground, her gaze unwillingly fixed on the view through the archway. Her unknown assailant growled –he was presumably on top of her prone form; she could imagine it raising a knife to the back of her neck. Again, the only way to move was forward; she used her palms to push her armored body out from underneath the elite, her gaze desperately darting about in search of her weapon, of any weapon. The enemy was still on top of her; forward wasn't working.

Gathering her last reserves of energy, she jerked her entire body upward, forcing her way onto her hands and knees. She fell backward onto the elite, its arm now wrapped around her neck, her legs kicking out into the open air. Her hands grappled at the arm that trapped her, trying to and then successfully slipping her helmeted head out from its grasp. She rolled out of reach onto the open platform, breathing heavy, winded, and desperate for everything, desperate for anything, a gun, a grenade, breath, space, life. Her hands grasped at an empty belt; all of her weapons, her other limbs that she knew so well, seemed to have disappeared. Her knife… where was her knife? And, as soon as she looked for it, she found it, lying across the space just beside the alien's left leg.

The damned elite was between her and her knife.

She drew on strength that she didn't know she had and launched herself forward. She didn't need a weapon. _She _was the weapon. She wrapped her arms around the elite's leg, nestling her shoulder roughly against its waist, and pushed the alien over her shoulder. It hit the ground loudly, stunned, giving her enough time to snatch up her blade. She turned around, the very picture of vengeance, righteous or otherwise, and walked forward, blood still smeared across her armor. The elite lying in front of her didn't move, perhaps dead or knocked out. It didn't matter; Six liked to be certain of her kills. Taking the hilt of her blade in both hands, she drove the knife down into a chink between the alien's shoulder and breastplate, pushing it in at just the right angle to puncture the heart. Blood burst forth. Six stepped back and took her knife with her.

Carter's voice was still crackling in her ear, growing increasingly panicked in tone: "_Lieutenant? Six? What's going on over there? Six? Are you alright? What's happening?_"

"I'm fine." Six turned away from the corpse, toward the view, and did not feel fear. "Why wouldn't I be?"

"_I thought for a moment–_" She listened for his next words but they did not come. "_We've got Jorge. We're on our way up._"

The sound of propeller blades whipping through the air turned her attention back to the view. She ran out onto the platform and then stopped in the archway. "The gap," she said aloud.

"_We can't get any closer,_" replied Carter. "_The Grafton's set to take that thing down. You need to jump._"

"I can't jump that." Her voice was bordering on babbling as she shook her head.

"_Six,_" it was Jorge now, speaking in that slow, calm way of his that Carter never could truly master. "_You've done good work. Now we need to get you out of here. You need to make the jump. We're going to catch you._"

The shaking of her head turned into a nod and Six backed up several fight, letting the shadow of the archway pass over her again. She took a deep breath, that same word –_survival_ –still on her mind and she took off at a sprint. God, she loved to run even if she was running into thin air, which is what she was doing. The sole of her boot pushed off against the edge of the platform and then there was nothing below her and only Jorge and Carter before her. Even gravity wouldn't be enough to keep her from them.

Her torso slammed into the falcon; her hands reached out for something to grasp and then there was Jorge reaching down to pull her up and into the vehicle and there was Carter sitting her down beside him. She imagined he was smiling and she let her heavy breathing subside as he said into his comm.: "Control? This is Noble One. Spire One is green and you're free to engage." She knew he was smiling as he said, "Have a nice day."

She let her shoulders slump into the curve of her seat as she heard, "_Copy that, Noble One. Be advised, all ground units: Frigate Three-One-Eight heavy is inbound, and MAC rounds have been authorized._"

"Mac rounds?" Jorge repeated, incredulous. "We're using Mac round in atmosphere?"

"One way to get their attention," replied Carter as the Grafton passed their falcon by and Six nodded contentedly at his words, suddenly feeling too tired to take up issue with anything. She didn't even turn to watch the spire fall, only watched as Jorge nodded in apparent satisfaction. Her mind was already on her bunk and a well-deserved rest.

She barely noticed as the air above the Grafton began to emanate a soft, pulsing, violet glow. She didn't even blink when their AI spoke up: "_Detecting a new contact._" There was a moment of silence and then the air seemed to shake. Six only looked up when she heard Jorge's sudden, strangled cry of, "No!"

Carter and Six turned in their seats just in time to watch as a bright beam of light split the sky above the Grafton. All three Spartans could only watch in mute horror as the beam crackled down from above and split the frigate down the middle. Six found that she had nothing to say; there was nothing that could alleviate the tension or dispel the shock. It was Carter as it always would be Carter who was the practical one that spoke first: "Get us out of here."

"Where to?" asked the pilot. Perhaps he was shocked as well.

"Somewhere that isn't here," said Carter. He settled back into his seat and Six thought he sounded a little desperate too as he added, "Anywhere that isn't here."

…

It was Carter, being the practical one again, that suggested the cave as Noble Team's regrouping point. He didn't say anything else during the long flight away from the lost battle and Six, sitting beside him in the falcon, found that unsettling. In the past weeks, she had become accustomed to hearing his voice bring the team back from whatever emotional mess they'd gotten themselves into. What happened when the usually dependable voice of reason was the one who was twisted up inside?

He was the first to exit the falcon, marching silently forward into the cave that Noble was now to temporarily call home; always temporarily. He brushed Kat aside as she stepped forward to follow him; another new development Six had not previously witnessed. She watched Kat slowly take off her turquoise helmet and saw that this was a new experience for Noble Two as well.

Emile, carrying in the emergency rations that every falcon was equipped with, was strangely silent as well and Jun was quiet too, though that was nothing new. Jorge merely leapt out of the falcon, took two steps into the cave, dropped his gun, sat down, and tipped his helmeted head back against the stone wall, presumably asleep. All of Noble Team tucked in early that desert night. No one even seemed to be truly keeping watch.

All of Noble Team save Six, that is, but she was well accustomed to being the only one wide awake while all others slept. Carter was sitting in the cave's mouth, asleep, awake, or even dead, Six couldn't say. She watched him for a moment and then, taking off her helmet with both hands, she bridged the gap between them and sat down opposite his seated figure. Her first thought was that maybe he was asleep, for he seemed to take no notice of her arrival and she was staring at her kneecaps –still stained with blood –when he asked, "What do you do when you think you're losing?"

"What?" she asked, taken aback by this sudden confidence. "I'm… not sure what you mean."

He made a slight noise of exasperation. "I mean, what do you do when things were going so well, or well enough as the case may be, and then things get screwed up beyond repair in one fell swoop? What am I supposed to do when I think we're losing here and there isn't anything I can do about it?"

"Don't tell me you get depressed."

"What else can I do?" The edge in his voice surprised her. Perhaps he really was asking for her answer. "What would you have me do?"

"I would have you take that helmet off." Her own answer was a surprise to Six as well. "No one can breathe in these things, not even you, the model Spartan."

"Am I 'the model Spartan' then?"

"Enough people think highly of you."

"Not the people who count."

It took her a moment to realize who he was talking about. "Nobody counts me," she replied and, even as she spoke the words, she thought she sounded defensive, as though she were daring him to contest her statement. "Nobody counts me."

Carter didn't rise to the challenge. He was silent a moment, still, motionless, and then he reached his gloved hands up and pulled the helmet off of his head. It was too dark to make his features out clearly but she knew he was still looking at her. "What would you do?" he asked her again. "I feel like we're fighting a losing battle, that the ship is sinking around us and I suddenly don't want to be the kind of captain that will go down with it, even if it would be the honorable thing, the right thing."

"So you want to run away?"

There was a long pause before he said, "Sometimes."

"I don't get like this," she said abruptly. "I don't know what to say. What can I say? I don't… I never get like this."

"What do you get like then?"

She met his gaze. "I get angry," she answered flatly. "I get angry and then I get even. They take something from me, I take something from them. I don't get sad or sorry. I get angry. The problem is that sometimes I get so angry that I forget what I was angry about and then I can't get even. I'm just angry and that's suddenly all I've got."

"And I could never forget," Carter replied dryly. "But what can I do?"

She looked at her stained gloves. "I don't know why you ask me these questions," she said flatly. "You have nothing to gain from asking _me_. I have nothing I could give, even if I wanted to. I've got nothing."

"But do you want to?"

She stared into space; the focus of her vision was her own right foot splayed out against the ground. "Sometimes. Sometimes I wish I could. Right now… I wish I could. But what can I do? You're the commander." She laughed suddenly, forcedly. "You're supposed to be telling me what to do, that I have to keep up the fight."

"And what if I can't?" he asked. "Are you wrong to put your trust in me, wrong to trust that I will tell you to keep up the fight?"

"I trust you," she said and, even as she said those words for the first time, she knew them to be true. "I trust you but the rest is up to you. I kill people; I –I don't even do that. I kill people that other people tell me to kill. I'm a weapon; I'm not a leader of men. I can't tell you how to be or what to do and that's the truth of it."

"I think you underestimate yourself," was his response. She met his blue eyes disbelievingly. "I think you underestimate yourself and the effect you have on people. Things like making us call you 'Six' instead of your name; they affect all of us. It makes us see you as a number instead of a person and then we all think of ourselves as numbers because you're the same as the rest us when it comes down to it."

"Why do you have to see a number instead of a person? Why can't you see a person instead of a number?"

"Because we are numbers when it comes down to it–"

Six got up abruptly, cutting Carter off midsentence. "I can't debate this with you all night. I'm going to go to bed and I'm going to think of a way to get even because you obviously aren't going to. You're acting like you're the only one all cut up about this; well, I'm angry. And I'm going to do something about it."

She picked up her helmet from the ground, her eyes feeling very hot all of a sudden. She started toward the back of the cave where the rest of the team was presumably fast asleep. She didn't hear him get up, his helmet clattering down against the cave floor, didn't hear him cross the space between them. She barely heard her own helmet fall to the ground as he took her by the shoulders, turned her around, pushed her against the wall, and kissed her.

She felt her entire body tense for a moment and then something in her seemed to snap –just a little, just for a moment –under the pressure of the wall against her back and his hands tangled in her illegally long hair. She felt her eyelids flutter shut and knew that she couldn't pull back or away; there was nowhere to go. She was trapped and in more ways than one. She let him kiss her, demandingly, almost angrily, and then Six woke up again and she pushed him away.

"That didn't happen," she said flatly. "I'm telling you that didn't happen and I'm going to bed now."

She walked away without waiting for him to say anything, scooping her helmet off of the floor as she went. She piled her hair back on top of her head as she walked and pushed the red helmet back into place so that she wouldn't have to look at anybody, so that nobody would look at her, so that she could be faceless again.


	18. Questions and Answers

**Winterbirth**

_A Halo Reach Fan Fiction by Marianne Bennet_

**A/N**: To give them credit, I want to make it clear that I the writer did not originally intend for them to kiss at the end of that last chapter. Six and Carter (mostly Carter) came up with that all on their own. It was like a movie and I was just trying to scribble down as much as possible as it went by. Sorry: no fighting in this chapter. Well, no battling the Covvies anyway. XD Thank you's to my readers, reviewers, and loyal beta-reader **EternalEntity**. Enjoy!

**Eighteen: Questions and Answers**

_August 13__th__, 2552 _

The next morning's dawn brought questions. Even as Six's eyelids fluttered open from a deep and relatively untroubled sleep, she had already decided that she wanted answers. She was angry and there suddenly were more reasons than a Covenant victory to feel so. The morning was hot; there was a reason. Her hair was a tangled mess; there was another. Her commander had kissed her the night before; all the more motive to be aggravated.

Emile was already eating when Six woke up; big surprise. Jorge was bundling their remaining ammunition together presumably in preparation for an evac. She walked past Kat on her path the cave's opening; she could not meet the other female Spartan's eyes even as Kat looked up from her tablet to note Six's passing. Why was that? Six's throat twisted uncomfortably. How long would it take for Kat to figure it out and have a legitimate reason for hating her?

Her eyes were intent on her commander's back as she walked forward. Carter was discussing something with Jun; Six cared little for their conversation's subject. The previous night's events had left her confused; she wanted nothing more than for her previous clarity to return. Resting her hands and the helmet it held against her hip, she fixed her gaze on her commander until he cared to take notice.

He didn't. He stood there, continuing his conversation with Jun, ignoring Six as though she had become invisible overnight. Vexed beyond belief by his attitude, she bit down on her lower lip and continued to stand at attention.

"Well, you don't look like you're waiting for anyone to stop talking at all," said someone at her ear.

She turned immediately and swatted at Emile with her gloved hand. "Leave it," said Six, a note of warning in her tone. "This is between the commander and me."

"Is that so?" A sardonic grin tugged at the corner of his mouth as he spoke. "You act like we all don't have eyes or ears, newbie. You can't keep secrets from Spartans; we pick up on everything automatically. I know what's going on with you and Carter. Looks like the love finally won out on the love-hate relationship."

Six didn't doubt that he knew what had happened and didn't care enough to contest any of what he said. Right then, the only thing she wanted to find out was: "Does _she _know?"

"She probably doesn't want to," answered Emile with a shrug. "Why so concerned? I wouldn't have figured you to be one to mind other people's feelings."

"Hypocrite."

"Maybe I was looking for a kindred spirit."

"You won't find one here." She continued to refuse to even glance in his direction. "Back off, Emile, before I punch you. And I can hit pretty hard."

He believed her; she could tell from the sound of the tiny step backward he took. She allowed the tiniest of smiles to escape her stern expression. "Why do _you _even care?" was the next thing she wanted to know. "And why is it even such a big deal? It was one kiss. It's not the end of the world." She laughed a little, mostly to alleviate the tension. "You should have been in Beta Company. Everyone was kissing everyone there."

"Yeah, well, it wasn't that way in Alpha," Emile answered with a nonchalant shrug, folding his arms as he spoke. "We were being built to be broken, to be expendable. Taught us all whole new ways of looking at life. On the emotional front, we recruits split down the middle. Some of us figured that if we weren't gonna live long anyway, we might as well live hard and fast but that nothing really matters when it comes down to it. And then some of us –the girls mostly –decided that everything meant everything, that life needed to be taken seriously, very seriously." He rolled his eyes.

"I don't think I have to guess which school of thought you belonged to."

"Ouch." He winced dramatically.

"Why were you…" Six hesitated, suddenly puzzled. "Why were you even listening, last night? What did you have to gain from that?"

"Why did I have to gain anything?" Six didn't answer even though he was obviously waiting for her to speak. "That's the thing I don't get about you, newbie. You act like there always has to be this give and take; that everybody has to want something from you. Look, I was worried about the commander. He can get depressed sometimes and somebody's gotta pull him back. But it looks like you took care of that this time around."

"Why is everyone on this team so inspired to change my attitude?" Six closed her eyes in exasperation and then opened them slowly. "Are the commander's efforts not enough?"

"Well, you're still unbearably broody, aren't you?"

"You're one to talk."

"Are you going to call me a hypocrite again, newbie?"

"I might just do that if you don't shut up."

Emile paused before speaking and took a moment to look her over. "I bet I could take you in a fight, you know. I bet you're pretty fragile under all that armor."

"Save it for the Covvies, God damn it." Abandoning her original strategy of stoic patience to catch Carter's attention, she allowed her face to crumple into an exasperated expression and called out, "Commander! You're about to have to find yourself a new Noble Four. And a new Six, since Command probably won't let me killing him slide."

"And you'd have to tell Holland not to send you another psychopath," added Jun with a rare grin.

Carter scowled and folded his arms. "It seems like I've already got two of those hanging around. At least I'm trained for it now. What is it, Six?"

"I need to talk to you."

"What about?" His gaze felt hard when he looked at her.

There was no eye rolling, no smirk, and no sneer as Six responded. She met his eyes evenly and said, "You know what about."

"Jun, Emile," said Carter after a moment's hesitation, "do you mind making a quick sweep of the area? Mark a couple of choke locations if the Covvies aren't already hanging around in the canyons?"

"No trouble, commander," Jun spoke up for the both of them. "We'll head out right now."

"Get Kat on the comm. with you. Be back before noon. We need to put together a new plan."

Six waited for Carter to make the first move. For his part, Carter waited for Jun and Emile to meet up with Kat before they took off into the canyon. He remained silent until the precise moment when Kat placed her helmet securely on her head and only then did he speak up: "I have no idea what you're going to say."

Her brow furrowed slightly at his opening comment. "Is that a compliment?"

"I've been told that I make a good commander because I can anticipate people's reactions." He unscrewed his canteen's lid and took a sip of water. "I have no clue what's going on in your head right now. Is that to your credit? I don't know."

"Let's ask another question then," Six replied, pulling her gloves from her fingers as she spoke. "What was going on in _your _head last night? That's what I want to hear."

A slightly sheepish smile flickered at the corner of his mouth. "And I probably owe you an answer. But, to be honest, Jennifer –Six, whatever the hell you want your name to be because I've got no say in it –I don't know what I was thinking. That's the honest to God truth of it."

"Why did you call me 'Jennifer' just now?" Six raised an eyebrow.

"I told you last night that I don't think of people as numbers." He took another drink. "It would make my job way too easy."

"Don't you want your job to be easy?"

"Do I want to have no regrets about sending people out to die? I don't think so."

Amused despite herself by how the conversation's original intent had been turned on its head, she let out a brief laugh. "You think way too much and yet you didn't think at all last night?"

"Well, nothing happened last night, right, Six?" He rolled his eyes and she couldn't help but slightly like him the better for it.

"That was the original plan, yes." She toyed with the glove in her hand, stretching out the mesh fingers.

"And what changed your mind?"

"I'm not sure that anything did." Six cast her gaze sideways, looking out at the view. "But I can't help but be curious."

"So this is all an experiment?" Carter's tone regained its typical hard edge.

Six found that she didn't have any answers to that question so she said instead, "You called me a psychopath."

"I didn't. Jun called you a psychopath. After you threatened to kill Emile."

"But you agreed with him."

"I did." He shrugged. "What about it?"

"You had to have been thinking something," she said suddenly, unable to completely derail the conversation.

"And what if I wasn't? What if I wasn't thinking anything?" He sighed, ran a hand through his hair. "Look, if you're trying to rationalize this, it doesn't work like that. Is that what you're trying to do?"

"I don't know what I'm trying to do," she was stunned into admitting. "I'm… I'm not used to this."

"Not used to what? Feeling?" He cracked another smile, apparently unaware of how great an insult he had just dealt her.

She flinched. "Why do feelings have to come into the equation? Why would I feel anything?"

"Because you're not ignoring this like you said you were going to?" He took a step toward her. "Like maybe you thought you could?"

Six found herself staring at him for a long, tension-filled moment. "So what are you going to do now, Carter? Are you going to kiss me again? Why don't you do it right now, why not right here, why not right in front of Kat?" She saw him hesitate, check himself, his gaze flicker toward where Kat was leaning against the wall, presumably communicating with Jun and Emile. "And of course you won't. You know what you said about me not being used to feeling? I think you've got too many feelings. You think too much and there's your problem. And since you think too much and not thinking at all works for me," she took a step back, "it's back to the original plan."

She watched him look over his shoulder at Kat's profile, hesitate, and then take Six's shoulders and push her out of the cave and around the corner so that they were out of sight. Planting his hands against the wall on either side of her head so that she couldn't simply walk away, he said, "And here's where you hear me out."

Rolling her eyes, she interjected, "You seem to have a captive audience."

"Shut up." Six flinched, taken aback. "I don't know what it is about you, if it's what you say or what you do; hell, maybe it's just the way you look at me. You make me angry and, even with everything that's going on, not much will do that. I'm used to keeping my calm. Something about you gets under my skin and it's hard to believe that you're not doing it on purpose."

"And what if I'm not?" she challenged.

"Like I said: difficult to believe." His eyes scanned her face. "You're really good at it, you know. I suppose it's something you should be proud of."

He pushed back from the wall, gave Six more room to breathe, more room to flee again, if she was so inclined. She didn't though; the fight or flight instinct that she typically operated on seemed to have voided her system. She stared up at him and then honesty was torn from somewhere between her lungs: "I'm… I'm not proud of it. And I didn't want to have to hear that from you."

"You shouldn't go asking questions if you don't want to hear the answers." He smirked a little; an atypical Carter expression. "It's like how you shouldn't…" his voice suddenly faltered and the smirk dropped from his face. "I don't know what to say anymore. I shouldn't have kissed you. If I hadn't, we wouldn't be having this conversation and things would be better."

"Things sure would've been easier," she agreed wryly. "I don't even know where we're supposed to go from here."

"How about we save the planet?" Carter suggested somewhat sardonically. "Listen to us: we're acting as though there aren't more important things happening. We need to get back in the game."

"The 'Saving Reach' game," said Six with a snort. "Well, feel free to come up with a plan any time now, commander."

Carter laughed a little at that but his amusement quickly died down as did hers. They were left staring at each other for a moment and there was nothing to say. He just kept looking at her in a way that left Six completely speechless and then he leaned forward and pressed his lips to hers again. She closed her eyes, feeling his arms wrap around her waist, placed her hands on his shoulders.

When he pulled away, he was smiling. "It might not be easy," he said in a tone that in truth seemed to contain more bleakness than joy, "but it might be worth it."

She let her hands drop from his shoulders, opened her mouth, and found at first that she had nothing to say. She closed it and then tried to speak again: "Jorge and… and Kat are probably wondering where we went."

"Probably," Carter agreed and went back into the cave, throwing a hesitant smile over his shoulder at her as he exited.

She stood there for a moment, touching her lips gently with her fingertips, until the full impact of what had just happened wholly dawned on her:

"Damn it." Six hadn't meant to let him kiss her again.


	19. Lost

**Winterbirth**

_A Halo Reach Fan Fiction by Marianne Bennet_

**A/N**: Wrapped this chapter up just in time for the weekend. Thank you's to my readers, reviewers, and loyal beta-reader **EternalEntity**. Enjoy!

**Nineteen: Lost**

_August 13__th__, 2552 _

The sun was directly overhead as Jun, Jorge, and Six started up the path to the cave. Though usually talkative on long walks to nowhere, as scouting missions often went, both Jun and Jorge had been quiet that afternoon. Perhaps they too felt the weight that Carter had complained of. Six knew that she did; why should the rest of her team feel any differently?

She stopped midstride, surprised yet again by her own train of thought: drawing comparisons between herself and the other members of Noble Team? That had to stop happening and soon; Six didn't like surprises, whether on the battlefield or within her most interior thinking. "God damn it," she muttered.

"You're saying that a lot lately," said Jorge from behind her. He placed a hand gently on her shoulder. "Is something wrong?"

A little ways ahead of them along the path, Jun snorted. "What isn't 'wrong' these days?" he wanted to know in a tone just short of grumbling. Or maybe he didn't want to know. Six would always have trouble discerning the intent of his tone. Maybe he was satisfied with answering the question for himself: "It was bad enough that the Covvies showed up on Reach to begin with. Now we've lost a territory and a frigate in this gamble and another damned supercarrier showed up to boot, a problem I'm sure that Command will come crying to us to fix. As thought we didn't already lose…"

There was a moment of silence as Thom lingered in the air between the three Spartans, as tangible as a ghost. Or rather he was a sight unseen to Jorge and Jun; Six could not have any regrets for a man she had never met, for men that she had never known in general. She knew well enough that, once you start down that path of mourning the unknown, it would not take too long before you went mad with grief. Everyone was dying; some people were just better at it. By making the choice to save his team and the colony, Thom had only proven himself to be the best.

"Yeah, we lost somebody," said Jorge gently. "How many people do you suppose lost somebody when the Grafton went down?"

"Are you trying to tell me again that I should be thinking about the greater good?" Jun did not sound as though he would be pleased if that was that the case.

The sunlight reflected off of Jorge's visor, casting glimmers on the canyon walls as the Spartan shrugged. "It just gets easier the bigger you think."

Jun was quiet for a moment. Then, flatly, he said: "It never gets easier."

Beneath her helmet, Six nibbled on her lower lip, considering this exchange. She found herself thinking of that corporal at the mining facility –Sommers had been his name –and wondered who exactly had lost him. Had someone lost Sommers, right at the moment when the zealot had tossed him into the wall? Or had he been lost years before, dead the moment when he signed up for military training? For the matter, were all Spartans dead already, doomed from the start? She found herself smiling, just a little. What a futile existence.

Six mentally cursed. She shouldn't have started thinking in that direction. It was hard enough these days not to think of herself as a walking corpse encased in Spartan armor. But Carter… Carter made her feel as though she was _alive. _And, with that thought, with knowing that it took someone else and a man at that to convince her that living was worthwhile, Six knew she was already halfway to being lost. And she resented that he had that power of bringing her back to life.

"We'll have to tell the commander that that Scarab isn't about to budge anytime soon," Jun continued without missing a beat.

"I don't like being pinned down like this," said Six under her breath.

"Think of it as a breather," Jorge suggested. "We could all do with a break of sorts. It's been pretty clear that… tensions have been running high. With all that's going on, I'm surprised you aren't feeling… beleaguered."

So it seemed that it was too much to hope that even the good natured Jorge would be able to resist a little innuendo. Six felt her face flame and, not for the first time, was grateful for the safeguard of her helmet and its reflective visor. "I need to relieve some stress," she answered coolly, aware that she was playing right into his hands. "I think that taking down that Scarab would do it for me."

"If Command –or Kat –has any say in the matter," replied Jun with seemingly eternal bleakness, "we'll find ourselves taking down that supercarrier instead."

Six shrugged. "That's a satisfactory alternative."

"You're not as scary as you make yourself out to be."

"Leave her be, Jun," interjected Jorge comfortably. "And besides: who knows where Command will want us next?"

"Who knows?" Jun repeated idly. "But Kat knows where _she_ wants us and it's pretty funny how Command's directives and Kat's interests seem to always fall into alignment."

"If she comes up with something, it still has to be Carter that makes the move on Holland," Six noted.

"I respect Carter; I really do," Jun began and Six had the ominous feeling that she wasn't about to like what he was going to say next. "He's a good man; he keeps his head under pressure. Not much else is needed to be a leader."

"Where do you think _you_ fall through the cracks then?" Jorge wanted to know.

"'Keeps his head under pressure,'" Jun repeated wryly. "I could never be a leader of men. Something you don't know yet, Six, because you haven't been around here too long is that our commander's often just the go between for Kat and Command. It's a good thing since he'll usually crack down on her crazier schemes. But if Kat cooks up something wild and Carter's desperate for something to work, to go right, she plays off of that. The two of them in agreement is, well…"

"Formidable?" Six suggested.

Jorge hesitated. "Unpredictable," he offered as an alternative. "Once Kat has the commander twisted around her finger, there's no telling where we'll be headed next."

Six didn't like the idea of Carter wrapped around Kat's finger and the set of her mouth would have revealed that to anyone who was looking. But, even if someone was, the helmet would have prevented them from seeing anything nonetheless. And that was the way she liked it. Words were cheap: a safer currency than body language and one that could more easily be controlled and sometimes just as easily taken back.

Their destination was within sight; a familiar skull-faced figure nodded at their approach before disappearing into the shadow of the cave's opening. "_They're at it again,_" said Emile by way of welcome. "_Thanks for leaving me behind to babysit. You owe me, Jorge._"

"You still haven't paid up from Fumirole."

"_Are you kidding me? You're calling in debts from before Visegrad? A widespread Covenant attack wipes the slate clean, big man. Get with it._"

"You keep telling yourself that, Emile. Just remember Fumirole." Jorge chuckled before reaching up and pulling off his helmet with one hand as the three Spartans felt the cavern's darkness pass over them.

"He's the only one that really tries to mess with you," Six observed as she too removed her helmet.

"Emile's used to people being frightened of him. He doesn't really know what to do when somebody isn't."

"He has no reason to think he's _that_ scary," she scoffed in response.

"Nobody's told you about Rosenda, have they?" Six shook her head in response to Jorge's question, watched as a smirk tugged at the corner of the elder Spartan's mouth. "Why don't you try asking him sometime? Make sure he's not near anything breakable first."

"You even try asking, newbie, you're not going to have to be the one Carter reports to Holland for manslaughter."

"You wouldn't do that, Emile," replied Jorge comfortably. "That'd just be the next nail in the coffin for replacing you."

"Replacing me –or trying to –would be the _last_ nail in _Rosenda's_ coffin."

"Have you even met the girl?" asked Six, catching on quickly.

"Apparently, she's a 'people person.' Which, according to Holland, I'm not," said Emile scornfully. "The colonel just has no idea of the unending stupidity we Spartans have to tolerate when it comes to civilians, something the commander has never seen fit to mention," he added loudly, looking over his shoulder in Carter's direction. For his part, Carter skillfully ignored his team member, continuing his conversation with Kat. Six wondered if the art of ignoring Emile was something Carter had either had to perfect over the years or a talent the commander had been born with.

Either way, as Emile stalked off toward the cave's entrance, she found herself leaning toward Jorge and asking, "Why's he so angry with the commander?"

"There's no real anger," replied Jun, also observing Emile's progress toward the canyon's edge. "There's frustration… and resentment, but no anger. He knows that the commander was the only thing keeping him from being replaced on the spot before all this mess with the Covenant broke out. He won't cross Carter."

"That doesn't seem to stop him… much."

"Emile's not one to show respect at face value," said Jorge in response to Six's comment, "but, if you mean something to him, he'll defend you to the death against Holland or Dr. Halsey or anybody else. It should be said that he's got a strong sense of loyalty. Just don't expect him to be polite any time soon."

Jun dropped the briefcase he had hauled up from the falcon's hiding place onto the floor at Six's feet before yanking his helmet from his head. Observing the sniper's scowl, Jorge added mildly, "Cheer up, Jun. They're sending half the fleet over here to deal with that thing."

"'That thing' isn't going to float around up there doing nothing for however long it takes them to get here."

"And how long will it take them to get here?"

"Forty-eight hours, give or take," Carter answered Six from across the cave. "Dot's saying that sixty percent is being sent over from various deployments."

"Two days," Kat jumped in, just shy of cutting her commander off. "We're supposed to sit around in this cave for two whole fracking days while that supercarrier rains down hell on top of us?"

"Glad to see she's come over to my way of thinking," Six heard Emile mutter not quite under his breath.

"It's not exactly my choice, Kat," Carter said, his voice barely overlapping the end of Emile's comment. "Command ordered us to go to ground. We go to ground. When they tell us to take that thing down, we'll take that thing down."

"And just how much ground will they let the Covenant take before we're told to do anything?"

"No one is letting the Covenant take anything."

"I beg to differ, commander," replied Kat curtly. "Every moment we waste, we lose something, somebody, and we're losing a lot lately."

"You're losing me, Kat," Carter remarked ironically. "Where's this argument supposed to go?"

"It's supposed to end with you taking action."

"Alright." He folded his arms and leaned against the cavern wall. "Tell me what I'm supposed to do."

Six saw Kat hesitate and knew that this was not a side to Carter to which the younger Spartan was accustomed. Inspired to intercede, she stepped forward and put in her two cents: "I don't like this any more than either of you but it does nobody any good if we start tearing out each other's throats in the meantime."

"This discussion isn't any of your concern, lieutenant," Kat started to say but it was Carter's turn to cut her off.

"Leave her out of it, Kat," he intervened. "If you want to bite someone's head off, it might as well be mine.

Six opened her mouth to say something more, something along the lines of that she could fight her own battles, but Jorge quickly placed a hand on her shoulder, mouthed, "Leave it be," and guided her toward where Emile and Jun were sitting at the cave's mouth.

"Have you two been listening to them?" she wanted to know as they turned their heads to acknowledge her arrival.

Emile and Jun wore twin expressions of exasperation and exhaustion mixed in equal measure. "Why bother?" the former wanted to know. "We all know who's going to win in the end."

"Why do you have so little confidence in the commander?"

"And doesn't your question answer it all?" Jun sighed. Six felt herself flush. "Why don't you ask Jorge who his money's on?"

"Her," Jorge answered promptly.

"He always picks her." The sniper sighed again.

"Why?" Six wanted to know.

Emile smirked at her. "She's always had him dialed in and she always will. Kat's brilliant and he knows it. He's an exceptional leader and she knows it. They'll always work best with each other and they know it. So the fight always ends before it begins. He'll always cave. Or she'll pretend to and get what she wants later."

"Is that so?"

"That's right."

Noticing that something was up, Jorge interceded. "How long do you think this one will last?"

"Give it an hour," Jun advised as he got to his feet. Dusting off his kneecaps, he added, "Give or take, depending on whether she brings Halsey into the conversation."

…

She didn't. Perhaps Kat was aware of how low a blow that would have been. She must have, for it would have been unlike Kat not to anticipate every circumstance she could turn to her advantage. But Emile was right. The fight ended before it began and, therefore, it seemed that no one lost. Only someone who was looking could have seen Carter grinding his teeth after the fact.

He came to her first. "Here's the truth of it, Kat," Carter began, approaching her where she was leaning against the wall just inside the cave's entrance. "Our nukes are gone. They're either out of system or they went down with their ships. We've got nothing to hit the Covvies with."

"There's always going to be something you can hit them with."

"I hate to break it to you but you've been preaching to the converted."

"How converted?" Kat inquired and Six saw her pick up a tablet from where it lay beside her on the ground.

Carter saw her too and he said, "I know that look."

"You can always say no," she gave a little shrug.

"Done," Carter looked up and caught Six's eye. He smiled a little as he turned to back toward Kat and said, "No."

Kat glowered. Carter's grin faded. "You could at least hear me out," Kat told him reprovingly. "You've said 'yes' before."

"Fine," he sighed and allowed his shoulders to slump against the opposite wall. Six watched the two of them, standing in profile against the late afternoon sunlight, and felt some scorching manifestation of jealousy bubble up in her throat like bile. She looked away, saw Emile watching her reactions, and then looked in the other direction, all the while hearing Carter say: "I'll hear it. But, I'm telling you, we've got nothing to hit them with."

"There's always something you can hit them with," she repeated. "It just depends on how much you want to hit them."

"I'll take your word for it."

"Remember," Kat began and then hesitated. Out of the corner of her eye, Six saw the young lieutenant commander scan her leader's face. To Six's satisfaction, Carter seemed impassive. "Remember that accident a couple years back?" Kat continued quickly. "There was a colony ship en route to Cyprus."

"I think the final casualty count was seven hundred," Carter nodded. "The slip-space drive malfunctioned. What about it?"

"The drive was fine," she corrected him quickly. "Some idiot mounted it wrong after the last haul-out. Moment they tried to activate the drive, they found half of themselves teleported to oblivion."

"Sad story," Carter commented, keeping his tone indifferent. "It's relevant how?"

Kat shrugged, seemingly artless in her delivery: "It was a truly unfortunate accident. So many lives lost. But perhaps a certain Covenant supercarrier could stand to suffer such a tragedy."

That got Emile's attention. The warrant officer quickly leapt to his feet. "Maybe if we provided the Covvies with some assistance," he drawled as he came to stand beside Kat. "I can't think of anything better to do anyway."

Carter kept his eyes on Kat. "Even for you, that's…" 

"Inspired?" she raised an eyebrow, daring him to correct her.

And he dared. "Not the word I would use."

"What exactly is going on?" With that question, Jorge crossed over to Carter's side. Exchanging a quick glance, Six and Jun held position at the back of the cave.

"You explain," Carter gestured to Kat and in that movement ceded control of the situation to his second. Six didn't like that.

Kat smirked; Six didn't like that either but, when Jun nudged her armored shoulder, she stood up and followed the sniper to stand beside the rest of her team. Peering over Jorge's shoulder, she saw Kat reach for Emile's knife and watched as he swatted her hand away. Kat checked herself, reevaluated her approach, and reached out her hand once more. "May I?"

She watched Emile's face as he hesitated and then handed her his blade. "Don't cut yourself," he told her before settling back against the wall. It was a moment before his customary scowl reappeared and, in that moment, Six seemed to have picked up on something: _Oh._

Whatever Six saw, Kat did not seem to. With authority only granted by the knowledge that all eyes were on her next movements, she carved a circle into the dirt floor and stabbed the knife into the center. "Objective? Destroy Covenant supercarrier in geosynchronous orbit above us."

"This sanctioned, sir?" asked Jorge, glancing at his commander.

Carter shrugged, his expression remaining stubbornly blank. "You tell me."

"Method?" Kat continued as though no one had spoken. "A slip-space drive in lieu of the nukes we don't have. Delivery system?" She smiled up at the other members of her team. "Us."

"So why don't we just blow up the entire Covenant fleet while we're at it?" Jun muttered. "If just getting our paws on a slip-space drive is easy enough?"

Kat continued to smile politely. "Don't be a pessimist," she told him.

"A pessimist is what an optimist calls a realist. Don't tell me you're becoming an optimist."

"Of course not," she replied. "I know the odds."

"Good. Because optimism is denial and there's no denying that there are holes in your plan," Jun shrugged and smiled back at her, the expression stretching across his tattoo. "Feel free to continue."

"I have a solution."

"Great," said Carter. "So how are we going to procure an orbit-capable transport and the single most expensive piece of equipment known to man?"

"As a soldier in the field, I couldn't possibly have access to those kinds of resources," answered Kat, opening her eyes very wide. "That said, were I to go looking, I might take a look at... I don't know, the nearest nonexistent launch site in the nonexistent Sabre Program, dismissed by three administrations as preposterous rumor." Six began to back away from the rest of the group. "And in which our newest member was _certainly_ never a pilot."

She froze, feeling the heat of five pairs of eyes on her. "Black ink, my ass," she said slowly. "How deep did you go digging into my ONI file to find that out?"

"So what else in there was true?" Jun wanted to know.

Six let a small smirk escape her lips. _Finally._ "Most of it," she answered carelessly. "I think the data clerk might've had a case of hero worship."

"No kidding," Jorge muttered.

"You're scary; you know that?" said Emile.

"That's enough," Carter interjected. He turned back to Kat. "Even if we have the pilot, even if we can get the ship, even if we can somehow manage to get our hands on a slip-space drive, do you really think Command is going to agree to this?"

Keeping an impressive straight face, Kat mutely handed him the tablet she had been typing furiously into earlier that day. He stared back at her, nonplussed. "I look forward to hearing the answer to that question," was her unruffled response.

He stared at her, looked down at the tablet, and then looked at her again. A sharp bark of laughter escaped his throat before Carter turned away from her, turned away from the rest of his team, and started pacing toward the back of the cave. As he passed her, Six heard him mutter, "Oh, there's no way in hell he's going to go for this."

"Don't look so glum," she told him.

"I am an eternal optimist," he said in response with a wolfish grin. "Eternally happy, aren't I?"

Another, quieter part of Six's mind noticed that Emile had never asked for his knife back.


	20. The Lightning Stikes

**Winterbirth**  
><em>A Halo Reach Fan Fiction by Marianne Bennet<em>

**A/N**: Made it to twenty! This is a milestone that I probably wouldn't have been able to accomplish without all of your support. To be honest, I never thought I would get this far. So, I'd like to shout out a big 'thank you' to my readers, reviewers, and wonderful beta-reader **EternalEntity **who has stuck with me since the beginning. Enjoy!

**Twenty: The Lightning Strikes**

_August 14__th__, 2552 _

"They're done hiding," she observed, looking up at an early morning sky, the whole blackness and pure pinpoints of stars corrupted by the cool violet glow of the supercarrier overhead. The desert night was cold but it was nothing compared to the ice that had invaded the regulated climate of Six's Spartan armor. She felt anger well up in her lungs, crackle over her palms as she flexed her hands, but it was all cold, all ice. There was purpose to it. That was something new.

"Yeah," agreed Carter as he watched the Falcon travel over the canyon's rim. Soon Emile and Jun would be so far away, they'd look like nothing more than another dot of light in the darkness. Darkness was relative; who could say where in that night sky Six would be before the day was done? Maybe even beyond that. But who could tell?

"Yeah," he repeated, "but so are we."

She turned her eyes upward again. "It looks like there might be a storm."

"Yeah," he followed her gaze.

"We'll be out of its reach before it comes down."

"It's not the kind of storm you can outrun."

She paused before speaking. "So we let it get us?" she finally asked.

"Do we have a choice?"

"There's always a choice," she unknowingly echoed Kat's sentiment from earlier that evening.

"Running away isn't a choice."

"It's always a choice," she persisted. If she was persisting for the sake of the challenge she issued to him or because she truly believed her words, Six couldn't say..

"There has to be a time when you stop running," he replied decisively, "when you turn and face whatever is chasing you. And it can't chase you unless you run."

She had already turned away from him again. "Well, whatever is chasing us can't be worse than what we've already got on our plates."

"Our plates are pretty full," Carter agreed. He turned slightly toward her. "Do you remember what you told me before Viery?"

Six didn't look back at him. "You mean when I spilled my guts about my parents?"

"Not that," he replied. "What you said about knowing when you were going to die."

"What about it?"

"Can you tell?"

Her hair was beginning to get stringy from the days in the wilderness; she observed this and then tucked the loose strands behind her ears. "Can't say," she answered, careful to keep her tone indifferent. "It could go either way. I don't think anyone is coming out of tomorrow unscathed."

"So it's not just me thinking that."

"Carter," she waited until he turned toward her again and then she continued, "It's never just you."

He nodded, allowing her this, a grim, slightly twisted, and yet wistful smile lingering in the corners of his mouth. "Is this the last then?" he wondered aloud. "What a shame. We had one day."

"Well, I guess that's just one more casualty," Six shrugged. "It's not going to get in the way. Of anything. We can't let it."

"Just wait a minute," he cut her off. "What if I don't see you again?" 

"That can go either way. What if _I_ don't see _you_ again?"

"Do you care?"

Six took a step back, unsettled by his sudden enmity. "Why bother asking?" she met him blow for blow. "You seem to have already decided the answer."

"Stop." She stopped, taken aback again. He stepped toward her again and said, "I want to see you. Just as you are. Right now. Just for a minute."

She stared back at him, her expression equal parts confused and hostile. He studied her face, his eyes seeming to linger at her lips and the curl of her hair against her temples. "That's enough," he finally said.

"That's enough?" she repeated, slightly taunting as he turned away again. "What am I, a drug?"

"Something like that," he answered as he walked back into the cave, leaving her alone in the spotlight the supercarrier created. She watched as lightning crackled somewhere beyond the canyon. She closed her eyes, listened to the thunder, waited for the next strike to hit her, to make her feel alive again for just one more moment.

_No. Stop, _she told herself. _I don't get that. I don't deserve that. I am a Spartan. We're dead, doomed from the start. We don't get to be human. We don't get to be alive. I don't get that. I don't deserve that. It isn't for me. It isn't for him either. What the hell does he think he's doing? What am I doing? This isn't for people like us. People like us expect nothing, get nothing, and therefore can never be disappointed. So what are we doing here?_

Thunder rumbled from somewhere in the distance. Perhaps the lightning had hit someone else. What were the odds?

…

She had not come back to the Sabre Program's launch site in several years and had never imagined her return to occur under such circumstances. What did that mean about her; that she had been blind all those years back? Or did it mean that this Covenant attack was a true impossibility come to life? What had the odds been? Someone at ONI had to have done the math.

_"I want to see you,"_ he had told her the night before. What were the odds of that, back when she had sworn up and down -mostly to herself; once to his face -that she hated him? And, if she was going to wonder at imagined odds, what were the chances that they could actually save the planet? One thought led easily to the other; Noble Team and Reach's survival had somehow become so intertwined in Six's mind that she now had difficulty defining one from the other.

She shook her helmeted head as though doing so would clear her mind as the falcon descended on the beachhead. Of course any effort she had made was immediately rendered useless by the sound of Carter's voice, even when he said the most mundane things: "Set her down there, pilot."

"It's a ways of a walk," Jorge commented from where he sat beside Six.

"It won't be without excitement," the commander replied as the vehicle settled down against the water's edge. He was the first to leap from the falcon, sending sand flying first with his initial landing and then again with every step.

Six followed suit, squinting up at the glaring sun. "Could be worse," she replied. "It could be raining."

"It could be on fire," Jorge rejoined with a chuckle.

"It could be..."

"Let's stop trying to come up with how it could be worse and start making it better," Kat interjected as she too exited the falcon.

"It could be worse," said Six again, keeping her tone thoughtful. "You could have to deal with Emile too."

Kat sighed and Carter said, "Alright, that's enough. This isn't any time for games."

"Wouldn't have thought so myself," replied Jorge mildly, "but, if we can't laugh about how everything has gone to hell, how the hell do you expect any of us to get through this?"

"The main point is to make sure that the Covvies aren't the ones laughing when all of this is done."

"And we can still do that, commander," said Jorge in return, "but allow us some levity."

Carter looked to Six and Six didn't know what to do. Was he asking her to take sides? Should she take sides? Why should she take sides? Why should -why did any of these people matter to her? What had changed in her or in them? It must be them; Six considered herself to be a constant. But then what was happening to her? This was something Six was still trying to figure out.

"I'll laugh when this is all over," said Carter when Six did not say anything, "and it's not over yet. Let's get moving."

_But when will it be over?_ Six wanted to know as the team started up the beachhead. _Will it be when the Covenant is completely eradicated? Will it be when we're completely eradicated? When will Carter find it an acceptable time to laugh?_

They were coming up on the back of the Covenant forces camped out along the launch site's exterior. The enemy's outer defenses had been turned inward by the earlier UNSC strike force; Six wondered if those troopers had been told that they were little more than a diversion to distract from the real soldiers' arrival. She doubted that, even felt a little pity for the troopers' impending doom, but admitted that they had served their purpose. In a matter of moments, the Covenant would find themselves with a battle on two fronts with the greater -the Spartans -flanking them.

They were kicking up sand with every step. With a few quick signals of his hand, Carter indicated that Six and Kat would take point and so they did. DMR in hand, Six scanned the surrounding rocks and brush with her gaze, looking for something, anything. It was an unspoken observation amongst the four Spartans that it was too quiet for comfort. In fact, there was... nothing. No birds, little wind... _that's not good. _

"Alright," Kat muttered into the comm. "In about ten seconds, I'm going to start shooting everything in these bushes."

"Not a good time to get trigger happy, Kat," Carter said from behind them.

"Do you remember those insurrectionists at Amal?"

"And the hurricane that Command sent us into? That's not something I'll forget any time soon."

"There's a hurricane in the western ocean," said Jorge quietly. "It's flooding everything. No one seems to care."

"Can you blame them?"

"I think I'll reserve judgment myself," Carter answered Kat. "Come on, team: up the hill."

Six obeyed, despite her apprehensions. Parting the brush with her next step, the twigs cracking beneath her heavy boots, she cut a swath through the undergrowth. The dirt was sandy; this close to the beach, it was bound to be. It slipped out from beneath her feet as they moved up the cliffs. She was just thinking that the ground was definitely unstable this close to the water when plasma streaked across the sky.

Skirmishers darted amongst them; Six suddenly felt clunky and useless in comparison to their lithe sprinting. She consoled herself with the thought that she didn't have to run after them to shoot them and was quick to act on that revelation. Down the jackals went and the Spartans were able to move up onto higher ground.

"The base is dead ahead," Kat informed them, breathless from the fight.

"Keep moving," Carter told them again. Six wondered why he had to say that so often but obeyed.

"They're dropping off troops," Jorge added as pods hurled down into the open space ahead.

"Seraph overhead," Kat noted.

_Shut up_, Six wanted to say. _I work better without comm. chatter._ But she stopped herself. They were just trying to look after each other. Why had it taken her so long to figure that out?

"There!" Carter shouted suddenly and eliminated another lone skirmisher with a single shot from his DMR. The enemy fell at Six's feet; Carter was shielded from her scowl by her helmet's visor. That should have been her kill but there was no time to dwell on it. She could settle the score later.

She danced across the battlefield, withdrawing to an open corner, her newly vulnerable position enticing a trio of grunts to stumble out of the brush's cover. They waddled across the field, gearing up their plasma pistols for a killing blast, but Jorge's machine gun cut them down, as had been Six's intent from the start. _Good, _she thought as one of her bullets embedded itself in a stray grunt's forehead. _Let them die. All of them._

"The rocks!" Jorge called his team's attention to them.

Six immediately turned on her heel and started toward the assumed targets at a sprint. She was closest; it was only natural that she eliminate them before anyone else had a chance to. She rounded one boulder and then its twin, the bullets in her gun awaiting a second, permanent home, the knife at her belt seeking a temporary sheath, an enemy's heartbeat to share for the moment before the sound would cease forever. There was another grunt: good. There was a jackal: even better. She knocked one over the head, twisted the others neck until she heard the snap. They weren't worth bullets much less a blade between the ribs. Not anymore. _She_ was the only weapon; everything else was a mere extension of her own self. She had to prove it to herself now more than ever.

The dirt beneath her boots still felt like the grittiness of sand. They hadn't moved nearly far away from the beach as she might have thought. Or was the launch site closer than she remembered? That was right: they had to be on the water, just in case there was a crash. _Crash, crash, burn. _There was the _thump-thump_ of a jugular beneath her fingers. It became a twig in Six's mind. It snapped between her fingers. That was all. She dropped it, stepped delicately over the body. Her helmet turned in search of a new target. She savored the sight of crimson stained rocks. Carter would never be able to catch up.

He came into the clearing now. The arm holding his gun dropped from the _ready_ position to dangle loosely at his side. She stared at his visor; it was the closest she would be able to get to his eyes. She wondered idly what he thought of her, standing solo amongst corpses, her gloves painted red. She remembered what he had said, that he thought of her as a name and not a number. Jennifer and death were synonymous; Halsey could have told him that. _This is what I am. _If she could, she would have snarled it at him but the words stuck in her throat as though she had forgotten how to speak altogether. _Don't try to make me human. Stop trying. It won't work and it won't be worth it._

The sound of a crash -a _real_ crash; not one within her head -brought her to. Kat bounded forward from the other side of the rocks. "The seraph crashed into the facility," she informed them. "Let's hope it didn't damage our ride."

"It's not 'our' ride," Carter replied, finally turning away from Six. "_We _can't fly those things."

Six found her voice again. It was slightly squeakier than she might have liked but beggars can't be choosers. "Wait," she said and waited herself until she had their full attention. "I'm going up there alone?"

"Not alone," Kat answered. "Jorge will go up with you."

"No lone wolves," added Carter with unexpected humor. Perhaps he was not as phased as Six might have liked him to be. Either that or he had made a speedy recovery. He wasn't looking at her anymore; in fact, he was looking anywhere but at her. She'd take it and ignore the twisting in her chest at the thought of him... never mind.

"Stop stalling then," Six said with a shrug. "Let's move."

Was Carter stalling?The question invaded her mind as gunfire and the shouts of UNSC troopers became audible. Why would he stall a mission?_ Stop. Put him from your mind. _What if she couldn't? _Stop. Shoot. Kill. That's all._

It was easy to obey, easier still to permit the cool, calm voice of Spartan surety to take over. It was all ice, all cold and clean and yet so easily shattered. _No one shatters icebergs. Through years and years of cold, they make themselves indestructible. All it takes is dedication and time. _But they could do break icebergs now if they wanted to, with orbital rounds...

"Six," it was Jorge now, recalling her from whatever place her wandering mind had taken her to. "Get inside. Now."

_Who died and made you commander? _No. No one died. Not this time.

"I'm here," she heard someone else say with her voice and her suit seemed to carry her forward into the base.

"The control room's right through there. We'll hold them off, commander," said one corporal to Carter. His tone was less than optimistic and for once Six did not find that amusing.

The control room was filled with corpses. Kat shoved a couple off of the launch panel. "We don't have much time," she said through clenched teeth. "Got to get you airborne."

Nervous, Jorge drummed his gloved fingers against the bloodstained wall. "Can't believe Holland said yes to this," he said more to himself than to anyone else and Six thought she detected notes of apprehension in the elder Spartan's voice. She didn't blame him.

"Some plans are too good to say no to," was Kat's tart reply.

"Just get them out of the atmosphere before he's got a chance to say no," responded Carter. He sounded worried too.

"_Warning,_" interjected a cool, metallic, female voice. Six looked around for the source, her gaze lingering on the PA system. "_Warning: unauthorized forces have breached the facility._"

"They're not... talking about us, right?"

"No, they're not!" Kat snapped in response to Jorge's polite query. To her right, the bulkhead slid open to reveal the ramps up to a Sabre's cockpit and passenger seat. "Move your ass, Six!" she barked over her shoulder, fingers still nimbly maneuvering across the control panel.

Stunned into obedience, Six did so, crossing the room toward the fighter on command. Jorge hesitated. "What about you and Carter?"

"Jun's coming with a Falcon for us," answered Carter. Still, Jorge lingered, unconvinced. "We'll be fine, Five. Go!"

As Jorge walked past her toward the passenger seat, Six looked to her commander. "Are you sure you'll be fine?"

"Would I say it if I didn't mean it?"

"Yes."

He laughed at that but, when he spoke, his tone remained firm: "Go."

She went; again, it was easier to obey. She sprinted up the ramp, relished what she was sure would be the last time her feet touched the solid ground in a good, long while, and leaped into the pilot's seat. She scanned the various switches and controls laid out before her. _It's like riding a bicycle, _she told herself. _Just don't look down. Simple._

She looked over her shoulder. There was Jorge. Strangely, the sight of him sitting behind her made things easier. And then, suddenly, it didn't. "Carter..."

"_What is it, Six?_"

"It's not going to work." She bit her lip.

"_It's going to work._" But did she detect panic equal to her own in his tone?

"No, Carter." The launch sequence was beginning. It was T-minus... whatever. Vexation filled her thoughts; she had Kat to thank for that, making her start this before she was ready. But anger did not dispel the dread. "This isn't going to work."

The comm. was quiet; what did that mean? It shouldn't matter. She shook her head as the numbers counted down.

"They'll be fine, Six." Jorge's words were meant to reassure her; they did nothing of the sort.

She bit the inside of her cheek until she tasted blood, felt the Sabre lift into the air above the facility. She steeled herself, took the controls in hand. Carter didn't matter. It wouldn't have worked. But would _he_ be the one to die today? "Let's hope I remember how to fly this thing."


	21. Flying by Instrument

**Winterbirth**  
><em>A Halo Reach Fan Fiction by Marianne Bennet<em>

**A/N**: I got a little sidetracked by another project but I'm back. Thank you's to readers, reviewers, and beta-reader **EternalEntity**. That's all. Enjoy!

**Twenty-one: Flying by Instrument**

_August 14__th__, 2552 _

_It's like riding a bicycle, _Six told herself again as she locked the Sabre's thrusters into the forward position. _You never really forget how it feels because, if you do, you fall. And falling can't be an option here._

Reach was beautiful. So many planets looked like hunks of rock or ice from space because that was what they were and happened to be larger than their asteroid kin. Reach was different. It looked like a huge, multicolored gemstone, all blues and greens. Even the areas under shadow had the glitter of city lights, like the golden flecks in a lapis lazuli jewel. The view was breathtaking, even if she had seen it before. It was good to know that the world could still amaze her sometimes.

"See the hurricane?" Jorge pointed out the spiral of clouds in the western ocean.

She did. "Did you think we didn't believe you?"

"It's just amazing what gets forgotten or ignored the moment something bigger comes along," he replied. "We've stopped evacuating the coastal lowlands and turned all of our attention to cities on the other side of the globe now that the Covenant's come along."

"We're prioritizing," Six shrugged, her mind on the task –flying the damn Sabre –at hand.

"Something like that," Jorge didn't sound happy. "I suppose if the Covenant wins, there won't be any lowlands to save. Everything will be under that bloody glass."

Her first reaction to the thought of glass made her think of her helmet with its protective visor. What a comfortable layer of security to live under, she had thought not so long ago. Only now was she beginning to understand the true natural of its yoke. But everyone had to give up something for the greater good. As a Spartan, she gave up her life to defend her race. Better she make that sacrifice than an entire planet's population.

Damn it. Carter and Jorge's altruistic attitudes must be rubbing off on her.

"_Noble Actual to Sabre Bravo-oh-two-niner, over?_" The sound of Colonel Holland's voice in her comm. rattled Six back to the matter at hand. There was a war going on up here; had she forgotten already? All of this thinking was dangerous now.

"Copy, Actual," Six heard Jorge shift in his seat as he replied for the both of them. "Is that you, Colonel?"

"_That's right, Noble Five. Welcome to Operation Uppercut, both of you. I'll be your control from here on out._"

Just when she'd started getting used to taking orders from someone besides herself… "Have you heard anything from the ground team, colonel?" she couldn't resist asking. "Did they make it out after they got us up in the air?"

"_You need to focus on the mission, Six,_" replied Holland, gently reprovingly. "_You've got a long night ahead of you and none of it is gonna be easy._"

_Keep my mouth shut. Understood. _"Understood, sir," she answered as she maneuvered the Sabre into a trajectory path that would loop them back toward the cluster of ships in the near distance.

"_Noble Six, rendezvous at Anchor Nine with the Savannah and the other Sabres as soon as you've got a handle on the new system._"

"I was just admiring the new outfitting."

"_Orbital defense requires some upgrades,_" he said wryly in return.

"Looks like the anchor might be in trouble," said Jorge, peering out of the cockpit's window. "Let's give them a hand."

"Way ahead of you," she muttered under her breath and, with a firm hand on the joystick, guided the Sabre in a graceful arc through the open space between them and the anchor. She waited for her heart to drop into her stomach at the turn and, more to be expected, the _height_ but she felt… nothing. She shouldn't be too surprised. Perhaps it had been too long since she had last flown anything outside of a planet's atmosphere.

Flying and the altitudes involved did not make her organs twist and squirm the way other heights seemed to. If she fell out of the sky, it would be because the Sabre fell with her. Even if she turned the craft upside down, there was no chance of her body falling through the cockpit's glassy windows and hurtling back to Reach. The Sabre was a _part_ of her in just the same way that her Spartan suit was a part of her. If she could depend on the suit to keep her from getting shot by a couple of stray needles, she could count on the Sabre from letting her get _too_ mangled should they fall out of the sky. Or at least that was the way Six had to think about it to keep herself from being sick at the sight of swirling clouds and distant blue oceans.

Someone else's voice –not Holland and not Carter –crackled information over the comm.: "_Anchor Nine to all UNSC ships: our station defenses are down. Requesting combat assistance until we can bring them back online._"

"What did I tell you?" said Jorge offhandedly, still looking over his shoulder to track the progress of something –the other Sabres that had gathered around their craft perhaps, the hurricane maybe– "I'm reading multiple contacts."

"Bloody Banshees," she muttered not quite under her breath. "What are they doing here?"

"Is there any place the Covenant isn't?" he answered wryly as plasma began to dance around the Sabres like falling stars.

"Good point," Six acknowledged just before dipping the Sabre into a nosedive. She lifted her foot from the thrusters and jerked right on the joystick, bringing the craft around to curl just in front of the rightmost enemy, curving around its front guns. She hit the thrusters in the nick of time, making the banshee halt in its path but keeping them out of harm's way. A flick of the wrists had their Sabre twisting in a tight loop to come back toward the enemy, guns blazing.

Its pilot stunned by the feint-and-assault tactic Six had employed, the Banshee did not immediately fire in return. A round of shots brought its shields down to a flicker and then Six hit the missiles. One, two, three missiles pumped into the enemy –not so different from the shots of her more familiar DMR –and the Banshee was toast, a silent screaming explosion of overheated engines and punctured life support.

Six bared her teeth in a grin, taking a moment to cruise past the floating wreckage in a victory lap of her own mind before rejoining the fray, diligently firing away at each enemy in turn until each exploded. She didn't try any more hair-raising heroics; there was too much of a risk of hitting one of her fellow Sabres in a tragic mistake. Contrary to the beliefs of some, Six _did_ care about the lives of others… when they could prove useful to her, that is. So long as these not-Spartan pilots managed to keep their Sabres up in the air, they were useful.

Or at least that was what she kept telling herself. It had always been easier for her to fly by instrument, be unable to see the conditions around her for herself, work off of the readings that Command gave her, trust instincts based on cold numbers and not emotional responses. No _names_ of all things. But, in all honesty, no one seemed to care just _what_ she kept telling herself, just _what_ was going on behind that Spartan visor, so long as the Covenant heads continued to roll at her feet.

That is except for the other people who wore those same helmets. In particular, one certain person who was still down on the ground, still fighting to keep her up in the air for all she knew. But Holland was right: think of the mission, not of his ice blue eyes or the way they had turned almost silver in the darkness and moonlight of the cave…

"Steady there, Six," Jorge interjected into her thoughts. "You alright up there?"

The effect was instantaneous; she jerked back on the thrusters, face aflame when she realized that she had nearly sent them veering off into open space away from the dwindling enemy numbers. "Sorry," she managed to get out. "Sorry."

Numbers had never seemed easier.

…

"_Bravo-oh-two-niner, you are clear to dock_," Anchor Nine's communications team sent over the comm. and Six felt a mixture of relief and apprehension: relief at a job well done, apprehension at what they had to do next.

"_Noble Five, are you ready to go?_" Holland wanted to know.

"Affirmative, Colonel," Six had never envied Jorge's determination and the certainty of purpose that went along with it more. She pushed the joystick forward, directing the Sabre toward the hangar. As they pulled up beside the anchor at an almost parallel angle to the Pelican on the other side of the force field, Jorge rapped his knuckles on the cockpit's glassy windows. "I need you to hit the button to let me out of here, Six."

"You want me to open up the cockpit so we can _both_ fall out of here?"

"We're not upside down, Spartan. You'll be fine. Hit the button."

With a sigh, she complied and then clamped her gloved fingertips around the seat's armrests as the cockpit hissed open. Observing this as he unbuckled himself from his own seat and stood up, Jorge said, "You do realize that that harness is designed to keep you from floating away, right?"

"I'm just funny like that," she grumbled in return and felt rewarded by his answering chuckle.

The Sabre's computer was announcing something to the two of them, something about depressurization and the canopy being released but Six paid it no mind. With an unconscious smile on her face below the helmet, she watched Jorge glide through the zero-gee zone toward the hangar. Even with his bulky armor, he moved with a kind of grace. He almost made weightlessness look fun. But as the canopy slid shut around her head and Six finally felt secure enough to release her hands from the armrests, something in the way Jorge carried himself toward the hangar changed.

"_Ez megszakad a szívem…_" she heard him breathe over the comm. but she before she could say anything –probably something along the lines of, "What the hell is wrong now? Do I need to shoot something?" –Dot came over the comm. herself and interjected:

"_Noble Five? Please repeat._"

In a voice underlined with notes of measured panic, Jorge commanded, "_Pull up surface grid nineteen by twenty two._"

Curious, Six found herself craning her neck, trying to look down at Reach and figure out what had caught Jorge's attention. A few explosions caught her eye; looked like plasma coming down on the surface from somewhere within the atmosphere. So the Covenant was bombing something; what made this so immediate? They were always blowing something up. But what if that was… She found herself scanning the planet's surface with something like franticness. Where was the launch site again? Was that what was being destroyed? Had Carter and Kat gotten out in time? Holland hadn't told her anything, the bastard…

"_Gladly_," Dot answered and obeyed. "_ONI Sword Base: Sector 18-G._"

Sword Base. Halsey. _Oh_. She had never felt more guilty for being so relieved.

"_Noble Five, your pulse is elevated,_" Dot interrupted Six's thoughts. That was new; when orders and observations weren't undoubtedly directed at her, she tended to ignore them. "_Please understand that there is nothing you can do for Dr. Halsey and the others within Sword Base. The mathematics are determinate… Noble Five?_"

Mathematics meant numbers… why did the facts hurt? There was nothing you could do about facts. You could rest easy in the certainty of your absolute helplessness. If you could change nothing about a situation, why worry about it? Or maybe this was making Jorge angry the way Six got angry, the way Six made Carter angry. Maybe this knowledge would fill him with that sense of greater purpose. Maybe being the operative word. When you judged on emotions alone, the numbers were bound to get skewed.

Jorge was looking back at her from where he now stood in the hangar; what he was trying to see, Six would like to know. With so many layers of glass and armor and shields between them, who could communicate anything? Finally, he answered Dot: "_I know._"

There was a moment of absolute silence, of seemingly absolute understanding, and then someone had to speak up: "_Noble Six, this is Holland._"

"Go ahead, Colonel," she answered, tearing her eyes away from the Jorge, the Pelican, and the slipspace drive. _Focus on the mission at hand. Gotcha. _ She saw the green light flickering on her display and started the procedure that would undock her from the Savannah.

"_Get our makeshift bomb onto the Corvette and we have our delivery system, Six. Noble Five will escort the bomb. I need you and your Sabre team to clear the way for boarding._"

"Understood, sir," Six replied rudimentarily as she pulled out from Anchor Nine, looping around to regroup with the other Sabres.

"_I've really stuck my neck out for Noble on this one, lieutenant_," Holland added as though he sensed her passivity.

_That _made her angry. Who exactly was sticking their necks out here? Was it the military official in the control room with its regulated temperatures and sealed doors or was it the Spartans on the ground and up in the air, fighting for their lives as well as his? She thought of Carter and Kat, of how Holland had not told her of their fate, and her blood boiled. Who was sticking their necks out again?

She ground her teeth together. Now was neither the time nor the place to make a point, or so she told herself firmly. She could do that when the war was over, so long that the war being over did not entail her sacrifice. And if it did, the point was made either way. So she clenched her teeth, tightened her grip on the joystick, and curtly replied, "We'll get it done. Six out."

Yes, this whole damn war would be done before the night was out if she had anything to say about it.


	22. Pockets Full of Stones

**Winterbirth**  
><em>A Halo Reach Fan Fiction by Marianne Bennet<em>

**A/N**: I got a little sidetracked by another project but I'm back. It was particularly difficult to write this chapter but the thought of all of you lovely readers kept me going. This chapter is more introspection, less pure action, but, given the nature of these events, I think you'll understand. Thank you's to reviewers, and beta-reader **EternalEntity **along with anyone who has favorite-d or put this story on alert. You all truly keep me going with this rollercoaster of a story. That's all. Enjoy!

**Twenty-two: Pockets Full of Stones**

_August 14__th__, 2552 _

Weightlessness proved to be very tedious very quickly. It was dangerous as well. Six had had already had a couple of close calls as the new scuffmarks and scorches on her Spartan armor attested to. She tried not to be nit-picky about the condition of her equipment but it took the constant sight of corpses left and right –UNSC troopers and Covenant alike –to remind her that she was one of the lucky ones. Or was she? The troopers had signed up for this; not for this mission perhaps but for a general military career. She had been built to be a nothing other than a Spartan, all choices taken from her the moment she went under the augmentation needle. Freedom was about not having choices made for you; Six's decisions were limited to which gun she held in her hand at the moment. The forbidden long hair was one outward show of defiance; the internal insubordination beginning to brew in her mind was proving to be more of a hazard.

She watched Jorge's Pelican slip through the glimmering blue force field to land lightly just within the hanger; the shields previously preventing his approach had been lowered by Six's helping hand only moments before. She had neutralized the zero-gravity conditions as well, something which she was certain that the troopers carrying out the slip-space drive would be thoroughly grateful for if they knew. They didn't know though; it seemed that no one really knew what Spartans did to make their world safe. Ah well. The public ignorance did not really annoy her in the way Colonel Holland's did. The only feeling she got from the knowledge that she and all other Spartans were the sacrificial lambs behind the curtain was a general numbness.

Jorge was following the troopers out of the Pelican. "Glad to see you made our appointment," she said to him, idly greeting the elder Spartan with a shrug and the beginnings of a small and not-Six-like wave. She stopped halfway through the motion, tucking her hand behind her back. Jorge brought out the strangest things in her.

His voice, when he spoke, was warm. "I wouldn't miss it for the world, Six."

She might have been surprised by the abject finality that the combination of his words and tone implied but Six quickly ignored the _abject _and focused on the _finality, _rationalizing: this was the end. It would all be over in a matter of hours, for both of them. The war would be ceased for a quick respite of weeks, months if they could be so lucky. But who was she kidding? She had always fought in a war. There would be no final conclusion for Spartans; of that she was certain. And there was a strange comfort in being certain of uncertainty, like the feeling of numbness. It wasn't painful; only vaguely uncomfortable. It just felt as though her ears were plugged.

"The powder keg is on board, colonel," Jorge was saying into his comm.

"_Copy that,_" answered Holland promptly. At least Six could give him credit for being on top of some things. "_Six, we need you to get to the bridge. The refueling run with the supercarrier will have to be initiated manually. And ONI wants you to download whatever you can get from th__eir computers._"

"Consider it done." She heard Jorge's quick exhale of approval at Six's reply. She nodded to him, a hidden smile playing out on her lips, and started pacing toward the firearms the Pelican had been so kind as to bring along. She contemplated grenades as Holland continued distributing his orders:

"_Five, stay with that bomb. And discourage the curious._"

"It'll be my pleasure, colonel." Jorge listened for the click of disconnection and then turned around toward Six. "Hear that, lieutenant? I'll be all on my lonesome back here while you go out performing heroics," he asked her, internal tension bleeding through his careless choice of words. "Make it quick, would you?"

"You want this to be over so quickly?" asked Six in a slightly pouting tone even as she started for the door on the far side of the hangar. "I thought we were working so well together. We're having so much fun after all."

She heard Jorge's warm chuckle come over her comm. as she left earshot. "_I can't think of anyone __else I would rather sabotage a supercarrier with._"

For some reason, the curves and angles of the passageways between the Corvette's hangar and bridge reminded her of the sockets and wires of an electricity system. They wound and connected and looped back to rejoin other passages. It could get confusing, as Six soon discovered, as she seemed to be chasing her own tail in the search for the bridge. _Discouraging the curious…_ Perhaps Holland and the Covvies who had built this ship had had the same sentiment in mind. If humanity was protecting Earth, what did the Covenant have to hide deep within their territory? Why were they so threatened by a lesser civilization?

Six didn't have time to think about the possible illogic of this war; her job was to blow shit up, not philosophize. Her attention should be fixed on nothing but that ominous door at the end of this hallway, the door that her instincts told her led to the bridge. A few quick hand signals – a flat palm, two fingers pointed at the ceiling fingers then pointed at the door, and then hand clenched into a fist –told the UNSC troopers to follow her lead onto the bridge and then fall back and keep _quiet_. That was the most important thing. A Spartan's breath was silent thanks to her suit; a marine's very breath could be a liability.

There was a projection of the planet in the center of the vast chamber that housed the bridge, a miniature and hauntingly realistic counterpart to the view Six had had earlier from the cockpit of her Sabre. Even more haunting were the red triangles and blue squares that marked conflicts all over the land. There was no sense of proportion; how many soldiers, warthogs, pelicans, and otherwise lives did a red triangle signify? No: she had to put it from her mind. Spartans dealt with the present, never with the past and certainly not with the future. There was none.

The hurricane wasn't marked on the grid. Six had an up-close view of the illuminated region as she slipped through the hologram itself, eyes intent on her target. No projection of a planet was going to keep her from her objective. This was a dance, a game, and she was determined to win, just as she had been single-minded in her desire to be superior during training. No: that wasn't quite right. She had intended to be anything but superior, fueled by a need to be overlooked. She thought that maybe if she appeared less focused, less talented than her comrades in training, they would leave her alone. Halsey would leave her alone. But she was _good_ and the training suited her. She had not been able to ignore her natural affinity and neither had her mentors: the natural affinity to kill, to bring an end. More than that; to _survive_. Because, with every bullet put into an enemy's brain, her chances of survival went up. And that was why she did not understand Carter, did not understand Jorge, people willing to put someone else's continued existence before their own.

The hurricane was inside her now, the source of the adrenaline pumping through her veins, vibrating in her very bones. The rush was beginning to creep up on her, preparing her system of the thrill of when the enemy went down. And then the rush came. It came when she clutched her gloved hand down on the elite's mouth in a smothering grip and her knife slid smoothly through the chink in its armor. And when its body silently dropped to the floor, aided by her hand, she felt her heart rate rise and that sweetly sick smile spread across her face. The thrill never failed her in the way people so often seemed to.

Yet something did not feel right. She heard the step of the alien's comrade –though it had obviously been meant to be silent, she heard it anyway and responded accordingly –but when the shot rang out –caught by surprise, it had not yet activated its shields –and the UNSC troopers came storming in, it did not feel as it should. The rush was there, yes, it was there but it felt merely habitual and… detached. The strangest feeling, as though she were floating somewhere above herself and her actions and could only sense the aftershocks. It felt wrong and at the same time it felt better. She felt as though she were less of an animal; less instinct, more thinking. Was this feeling 'thinking,' this floating detachment? It wasn't right either. She should feel something more and yet she could not say just what she needed to feel.

The dull burn of a ranger's rifle woke Six up. She had already dispatched quite a few elites and bodies lay all around her. The UNSC troopers were wrecking their own kind of havoc –mostly running and hiding and sometimes shooting, drawing most of the attention anyway –so she supposed that it was about time that somebody noticed her. But that rifle _hurt_; why did it hurt so much? Either way, she knew one thing: that ranger needed to die _fast_.

She threw herself around the corner of a console, allowed the control panel to soak up the brunt of the focus rifle's beam. If the buttons and computer ports were too melted for her to download any intel on ONI's behalf, that was ONI's fault and ONI's problem for not sending their own man up here. Turning her torso, Six unleashed a series of bullets in the enemy's general direction. That wasn't working; the ranger was in a secure position behind the stairway railing and that focus rifle kept her from being able to get close enough for her knife to have a fighting chance.

Gloved fingers searched her belt's compartments. _Damn it; _she was out of grenades. Her back to the console, it was only a matter of time before some elite broke through the sealed blast doors and made short work of her. Pinned against the wall, even a Spartan's fighting chances were low. But she was innovative, or so Six reminded herself. She had been _bred_ to be innovative. _There's always something to__ hit them with_…

It just depends on how much you want to hit them. And Six _really_ wanted that ranger dead. If there were no grenades at hand, she would make her own. And that's when she saw the golden opportunity in the plasma pistol lying inches away from a dead grunt's hand a few feet to her left.

She broke open the pistol's lid; such weapons had been made to be disposable and there was generally no reason for the ammo to be replaced. Tearing free the plasma cartridge and tossing it aside, she loaded ammo from her own belt into the pistol and jammed the lid back into place. The trigger was still working –good sign –and she watched as the numbers on the monitor rose with the heat building in the weapon as the ranger's focus rifle's beam hissed overhead.

The metal grew hotter; it felt as though it was about to burn through her glove and Six felt her teeth clench. Hold out a little longer before letting go; the pain will seem negligible when the enemy is dead. The numbers went higher and higher but the sound of the focus rifle did not cease. If it didn't stop soon, she would end up blowing herself up. And then, mercifully, she heard the focus beam pause. Not wasting a moment, she threw her body right and tossed the overheated pistol into the cranny where she calculated the ranger to be.

Eyes half closed as she hit the floor –the trajectory of her leap landed where she had predicted it would, stumbling toward a second console close to the hologram of Reach –she listened for the scream as the metal seared the ranger's flesh before exploding. But there were two screams; no, that wasn't right. That couldn't be right. There was just Six and then enemy; no else factored in.

It was quiet now. She wondered how long she had stayed hunched over beside the console when Jorge came over the comm.: "_You get ONI's files?_"

Her joints moved at her command; her armor shifted as she uncoiled herself, both physically and mentally. Mechanically, her fingers felt for the computer drive in the concealed compartment in her armor just above her heart. She jammed it into the first port she saw; she watched the screen light up on the computer chip's command, watched the files download before her eyes. There were numbers, names, and call signs for vehicles, ships, field agents, and platoons. The list went on and on and they were all enemies, all of them actively working to destroy the civilization _her_ race had built.

"_Six?_" Jorge's voice grew more urgent. "_Six, are you there? Tell me you're there. Six?_"

_Say my nam__e, _she wanted to tell him. _Remind me that I'm human and I make mistakes, that it isn't my fault for being human, because I know what I just did and I can't face it otherwise. I was sloppy and I… I know what I did. I don't have to repeat it to anyone. I__ don't have to admit I feel guilty. I don't have to admit I feel anything. Don't think; never think. Don't think; never think. Don't think…_

"I'm here," Six answered. "The files are downloading now."

"_Glad to hear it._" Was he glad to hear it? She wasn't glad to hear it. She wasn't glad that _she_ was here to hear it and someone else wasn't. But Jorge didn't sound happy; what did that mean?

"I'm plotting the Corvette's fuel run now," she said as her fingers moved over the navigational computer's controls. Thank God the process was straightforward and simple; she wouldn't have been able to handle anything more complicated right now. "Congratulations, Jorge: we're ending the war."

"_Stalling it, more like._" But he sounded gratified… or did he? "_Hu__rry back to the hangar, Six. I've got something to tell you._"

She pocketed the miniature hard drive and thought about how Kat would kill to get her hands on the little piece of metal, if only to practice decryption. "Am I going to like it?" she asked as she zipped her pocket shut and started back toward the blast doors.

"_Just come back,_" was all he said and Six's mind was too preoccupied to debate the matter further. She turned her head as she approached the door, tried to ignore the scorch marks, the focus rifle at her feet, and the charred trooper helmet half-concealed under a ranger's corpse. _Don't think; never think._

…

Jorge wasn't wearing his helmet as he fiddled with the slipspace drive-turned-bomb's controls; what did that mean? She glanced at the discarded piece of armor lying at his feet; the visor was fractured. That was it; that had to be it.

"I've got good news and bad news."

What did that mean? Why'd he start it off like that? Would he just tell her already? They were nearly done; they could go back. Noble Team would return to dealing with insurrectionists in a matter of months and she would be there with them. There could be no bad news; the biggest minefield she could imagine having to deal with was Carter. And if that was the case, what was there to fear in his next words? "Hit me. No –don't hit the bomb! It's unstable as it is. We don't want it blowing on top of us."

He cracked a smile at the sound of her indignation. "Last ditch effort," he replied cryptically and then was quiet for a moment. In the background, Dot was saying something about seventy-something seconds until the refueling run but she wasn't paying attention to the AI. She was studying Jorge's voice. Finally, he spoke. "Pelican's engine is fried. We can't do anything about it in seventy-six seconds. That means that the only way off of this slagheap is gravity."

"You're kidding, right?" she groaned. "The universe has a funny way of thanking me for my self-sacrifice to humanity's cause." Jorge didn't smile so she didn't either. Instead, she tried again. "What's the good news?"

"That was the good news."

"Then what's the bad news?" Carefully, she watched his movements.

He turned to face her fully. His face was grim. "The timer got fried too. There's nothing we can do about that either. I'm going to have to fire it manually."

Understanding dawned on her. She felt her face wipe clean of all emotion to be replaced with shock that no one could see. "That's a one way trip." His silence confirmed that. She started shaking her head. "No, I can't let you do that."

"Six, there's no time for a long goodbye, let alone an argument." He didn't sound angry or sad, just tired and resigned the way she so often felt about her inevitable fate. His next words confirmed her thoughts: "It's a trip we're all going to have to make."

"Oh, yes: the Spartan destiny of self-sacrifice for the good of humanity," she spat out.

"Humans die too, Six," he told her, his voice gentle in return. "And you need to believe that I'm dying as a human for the sake of humanity, not just as a Spartan, because no one is here. And you need to understand that more than anyone." He took a step toward her. "Reach has been good to me. It's time to return the favor."

She took a step back. "You're not making me jump off of this ship."

"Don't fight me." He grabbed her with one arm and she felt her body go limp underneath her armor. "Don't deny me this."

He had hazel eyes. Why hadn't she noticed that before? "You're willing to die for everyone, Jorge," she said, her back inches from the hangar's force field, "but I've been dead a long time. Nobody's going to miss me. Let me do this. Go back to Noble Team."

"They need you," he told her in return, "more than you know. Now," his voice grew lighter; she could tell that the adrenaline was building in his system just as it was building in hers, "remember to lock your armor. You and Carter are good soldiers; you just need to remember that you don't always have to be soldiers in order to be good ones when it matters. And tell them to make it count."

And then he let her go. Her body was still limp as she drifted into the open space outside of the hangar. All energy was kinetic; the only reason she was moving at all was because Jorge had pushed her. The only reason she felt anything at all was because Jorge and the rest of Noble Team had pushed her to start feeling. Only now that she was literally floating did she realize that she had been floating this entire time, for her entire life it felt like.

The moments it took for the Corvette to glide past her on its path to the supercarrier –seventy seconds, Dot had said; it must be less than that now –felt like an eternity. And she drifted, waiting for the coming explosion to push her in a new direction: to push her back down toward Reach.

She had a front row seat as the supercarrier fractured and the slipspace rupture catapulted half of the colossal ship to oblivion. It took a moment for the waves of energy to reach her prone form but they did eventually and she began to fall faster. _He did it, _she thought dimly. _He's a hero. They'll use his face and name on all of the Spartan recruiting campaigns and really ignore that he's dead and there's nothing any of can do about__ it. But it's over now. He made it count._

And then she heard Dot come over the comm.: "_Slipspace drive detected._"

The comm. chatter began, different voices shouting intercut with Dot's readings, and Six was a captive audience as she slowly fell: "_Mult__iple Covenant signatures… Slipspace rupture detected… Does anyone have a visual?_"

_I do_, she wanted to say. _I have a visual. I see everything. I see the things you don't want me to see. I see the things you don't see. I see the things no one wants to __see._

"_This can't be happening… What the hell… Where'd they come from… Shit… Must be the whole damn Covenant fleet!_"

She smiled dimly at the sound of Holland's voice. He had really stuck his neck out, hadn't he? And now it was all for nothing. Jorge's sacrifice had been for nothing. Everything had been for nothing. It might as well have been her who activated the bomb and was the hero of three minutes.

"_Slipspace rupture detected," _said Dot again and Six closed her eyes. She was shutting down as she fell and she knew it. It was easier to shut down. It was easier to stop thinking, about Jorge, about Carter, about Jennifer. _Five, One, Six. _ Easier to think in numbers. Easier to float.

"_It might not be easy,_" she heard Carter say in her mind's ear, "_but it might just be worth it._" She opened her eyes again to the sight of the arriving enemy fleet bombarding everything in sight. Each explosion propelled her faster downward but they didn't know that. To the Covenant, she was a red triangle on a hologram of a battlefield. She was a number. And if the Covenant thought of her as a number, she had better start thinking of herself as something else.

But there would be time to think later. For now, she could drift. She could do nothing so there was no point in doing anything. She closed her eyes and tried to shut down again, tried to banish the explosions and the memories of dead bodies from her mind's eye. _Don't think; never think. Don't think; never think._


	23. Dead Girl Walking

**Winterbirth**  
><em>A Halo Reach Fan Fiction by Marianne Bennet<em>

**A/N**: Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you! That scene with Jorge had me shaking in my boots and I am so happy (and relieved) that you all enjoyed it! I recently got artistically punched in the gut and reading your reviews helped a lot. Thanks to my loyal beta-reader, **EternalEntity**, I bring you the next chapter. Enjoy!

**Twenty-three: Dead Girl Wa****lking**

_August 2552 –exact date unknown _

She had shut her eyes as she had fallen back down to Reach, replacing one blackness with another and half-expecting a third, more eternal darkness to eventually envelop her. When she opened her eyes, the brilliant blue sky was blinding. Her eyes immediately shut again by reflex and she waited.

She started moving, testing herself, flexing fingertips and toes, wrists and ankles, knees and elbows, the reverse of an earthquake and its aftershocks. Sunlight was burning through the shutters of her eyelids. It was a blue sky, or so she remembered: another reminder that this storm was over and they had lost.

She rolled over onto her right side. Her muscles groaned with the effort but were satisfied when she promised them no further movement. She was lying to herself again and, after a moment's rest, she forced her bones to realign themselves into a sitting position. Up went her head, followed by her shoulders. Her arms flopped ungracefully over barely bent knees; old, once habitual movements felt new and clumsy. Her head throbbed and every part of her ached but she was alive.

Her eyes flew open. She was alive. Her limbs were moving. Her eyes saw a blue sky and the outlines of craggy mountains; her ears heard the whistling of the wind. Her brain was functional, registering the landscape to be typical of a desert. She had _survived_.

_Of course I survived_, said the coolly dismissive voice that too often dominated her thoughts. _I'm a survivor. I'm a Spartan. Of co__urse I survived._

If she was a Spartan and if she was going to survive, there was no way in hell she was going to sit in a desert and wait for the glass to rain down overhead. _I'm getting up, _said that voice and her body obeyed. _I'm going to find somethi__ng I can use. _She scanned her surroundings again but that wasn't the correct course of action. Spartans looked to themselves first for the solution. She raised her right hand to her belt by reflex; breathed a sigh of relief when her fingers closed around the familiar worn case of her knife. _I'm going to start walking._

So she did. She started walking toward the mountains and thought of little else save the action of putting one foot in front of the other. She had no sense of her progress, no sense of time, whatever landmarks this desert could have possessed melted into a general background And, no, she was not about to start counting her steps. There was nothing but the mountains whose outlines seemed so close and yet so far away. There were only the mountains and the fact that one way or another she was going to get to them.

Night dropped down on her but she didn't stop. The sun rose again but she refused to stop. But darkness fell on the desert a second time and she felt her resolve give out. She hit the ground hard and gasped for breath. Her throat was sandpaper; her entire body felt brittle beneath the armor. Her hands fumbled at her belt again, fingers wondering if there was something more useful than a knife in its compartments. There was no light to aid her movements –her eyes were closed again –but her fingers were guided by immediate touch and distant memory. There was the pouch that typically held purloined plasma grenades, now empty; there was her canteen, its cap lost and its contents spilled. She unzipped a third compartment and slipped her fingers within and felt thin, cool metal and a chain –_that isn't right_.

Her dog tags were around her neck. She distinctly remembered looping the chain over her head that morning that felt like so many mornings ago, that early morning when Noble Team had gone to war; she had fumbled with the clasp and cursed its manufacturer. Emile had laughed at her and Kat had smirked. She remembered untangling the chain from knotted coils of hair that night so many nights ago when Carter had told her that they were losing. There was no reason for it to have relocated between then and now.

She pinched the stamped metal sheets between her thumb and forefinger and withdrew the dog tags from her pocket; the chain slithered out in their wake. She rubbed the pad of her thumb over the raised lettering and then held it up to the light, squinting to make out the letters and numbers. When understanding finally dawned on her, she dropped them onto the sand and resisted the urge to scramble on hands and knees away from them and try to forget again. But the evidence was damning: Jorge was dead.

Jorge was dead and she was alive. She was alive; he had died so that she could live. Those thoughts did not comfort her; they _terrified _her. She was alive and he was dead; that wasn't the way it was supposed to be. Or _was_ that the way it was supposed to be? Wasn't that the attitude that she had first walked into Noble Team's bunker with: that she was here to survive? If she didn't think that way anymore, what _did_ she think? Back on the Corvette she had told Jorge that she was willing to make the sacrifice… and he had refused to allow her to do that. But she had been _willing_ and that was terrifying too. What did she think and, more importantly, why didn't she already know?

_Reboot, _she told herself, her internal voice shockingly steady. _I am a Spartan. My number is B312, B for Beta Company. They call me Six now because I'm the sixth member of Noble Team. Noble Te__am just lost Noble Five so I'm the fifth surviving member now. Noble Team might not exist anymore. Colonel Holland is probably dead. I should be dead. I would be dead if not for Jorge. Carter and the other Spartans are probably far away if not dead th__emselves. I probably won't be able to find them. It would probably be best if I don't find them. They're going to hate me for coming back and Jorge not coming back if I find them… _

_What happened to Jorge._ Jorge hadn't died for Noble Six. Noble Six wasn't worth dying for, as she had tried to tell him. He couldn't have died for Noble Six; that wouldn't be worth it. She couldn't handle it if that was the case. He had died for _Reach_; there, that was much easier to compute. He had died for Reach, for everyone that was down on Reach: Carter, Emile, Kat, Jun, and Dr. Halsey. But Noble Six being alive when Six hadn't needed to be the one who survived muddled the picture. Jorge _had _died so that she could live and she couldn't get a grip on that.

"_They need you,"_ he had told her in the moments before he let her go, _"more than you know."_ He must have seen something in her that was worth saving and she couldn't see it. Carter saw something in her and she couldn't see that either. Even Emile and Jun had seen something worth poking at beneath Six's emotional armor. And Kat… She would never be able to understand Kat.

_Start again, _she told herself, _but different this time. My name is Jennifer. I'm told that __my mother was a scientist. My father was a soldier. They died in a Covenant raid on the planet Harmony. I became a Spartan and was assigned the number B312 when I was put into Beta Company. I may be a Spartan but I'm also Jennifer… somewhere. I _can _fe__el if I want to; feeling is just painful and problematic and I turned it off to make things easier. But, sometimes, _–she remembered –_it's worth it. Sometimes._

Jorge was dead and _Jennifer _was alive. Jorge had died for a _person_, not for an emotional shell of a Spartan, and Jennifer was a person. The Covenant may see her as a red triangle on one of their maps but that didn't mean that _she _had to. Jorge was dead and Jennifer was alive.

And she was alive. She was alive; her eyes were blinking up at the stars in the clear desert sky, her fists tightened, felt the sand slithering out between loosely clenched fingers. Her heart was beating like a hammer; she could feel her chest swelling with air beneath her armor. Spartan trappings were a shell, a façade, but it did not matter so much so long as there was an actual person behind the pretense. Jorge had been one of those. Thinking back, she realized that all of Noble Team had retained at least some of their humanity and maybe that really wasn't such a bad thing…

_Humanity is power and stupidity and weakness, _that cold voice at the forefront of her mind told her. _And the power isn't yours. It becomes someone else's. You give power to someone else. And how will that keep you alive? Look at Jorge. He wo__uld be alive right now if he didn't feel so damned much for everything and everyone. Is that where you want to end up?_

_There are worse ways to die, _said another more pragmatic voice in her head. _It would be nice to choose. Jorge chose and he didn't ha__ve any regrets. Maybe that's what that psychic meant when she said I had to do everything right in order to regret nothing. It's hard to regret something that you chose when you know that the choice is bigger than just you._

"_Make it count," _he had told her before he had let her fall. Make what count? Make his sacrifice count? Make her life count? They were the same thing now. Jennifer being alive and Jorge being dead were one and the same. So she had better make it count.

Jennifer picked herself up off of the sand and dusted off her kneecaps. She bit down on the inside of her cheek, eyes searching for the dog tags. She found them lying next to a small and scraggly shrug and brushed the dust away from the lettering before looping the chain around her left wrist. She saw the mountains again in the corner of her vision and inhaled a quick, determined breath. _One foot in front of the other, _she told herself and her legs obeyed.

She started walking and knew it would be a long time before she allowed herself to stop again. After all, she had promises to keep.


	24. Reunion

**Winterbirth**

_A Halo Fan Fiction by Marianne Bennet_

"A true war story is never moral."

-Tim O'Brien

**Twenty-four: Reunion**

_August 23__rd__, 2552_

Her shields were up but her spirits were low as she reached the summit of the slope and fully grasped the impossibility of the task in front of her. New Alexandria, once the crowning glory of Reach's cities, was burning. Smoke drifted between skyscrapers like the steaming residue of extinguished birthday candles to pool in a heavy and dark gray sky. As Jennifer watched in mute distress as a corvette descended in a swoop on a rooftop pavilion, she was struck hard with the strange and sad truth that the city was already lost.

Her first reaction was anger: typical, familiar, hot anger. Her fists tightened; the dog tags still resting in the curve of her palm bent slightly under the pressure but she didn't notice. She wanted to kill everything, paint the city and her armor a new shade of violent scarlet.

Her second thought was for survival, her personal survival, the one instinct that never let her down in the past. She thought about running to the nearest command outpost, demanding immediate medical attention that she did not need, and securing her place on an evacuation shuttle within the next six hours. If the city was burning, if the ship was sinking as Carter had said so many days ago, so many small eternities ago, her aim was not to go down with it.

But if Reach was a sinking ship, there were a lot of people beyond herself and her team that were in the process of going down on it. And she knew that, despite her sandpaper throat and exhausted muscles, she was in a better position to help than most.

A metal edge slipped between her glove's broken mesh fibers to rub gently against bare skin. Jennifer looked down; saw the dog tags in her hand bent at an angle between the r and the g. With a patient sigh, she turned her attention away from the burning towers and gently worked the stamped metal straight again. When that was done, she dropped the tags into her pocket along with ONI's data card, a second souvenir of Noble Team's hopeless feint at a quick victory.

She sighed a second time before starting down the slope toward the city's perimeter. If they were evacuating the people of New Alexandria as they were bound to be, Jennifer knew where she was supposed to be. It was what she thought Jorge would have done, after all.

…

There had been opinions, compliments, orders, and commendations echoing in her comm. all day but none of them had been familiar, none of them had been uttered from the mouths of the people she wanted to hear. Was it strange then that, now that she was on the brink of reuniting with her team, she felt afraid? Not afraid; worried, apprehensive, unprepared. It was like that first day all over again but worse. She wasn't filling a gap this time; she was bringing a new gap into the equation. _"He didn't make it," _she had told Kat as though it was a fact of life and she had answered, "_Understood,"_ as though it was merely an occupation hazard but it was so much more.

"You saved a lot of lives today, Spartan," said the nameless trooper that was accompanying her to the rendezvous point. He grinned at her; a slightly yellowed crescent-moon below a pointed nose and above the curve of his helmet's strap, a smile that could and would wax and wane with morale. She knew it would. Today, she was an inspiring sight: the super soldier coming directly from one battle to the next, ever vigilant; ever ready to protect the weak, ever prepared to fight for her species. What he didn't know was that she was tired, that she wanted to sleep, that she knew the sun was setting on Reach's survival and, like the sunset, she could do nothing to stop it.

_Small victory today, _a half-suppressed voice at the back of her mind said. _Save a couple hundred civilians so they can go to another planet, go to the next planet that the Covenant overwhelms. They're picking us off slowly; they're patient and you're only delaying the inevitable._

_Shut up, _Jennifer told the voice and she told the man, "I figure I'm here for a good reason."

"I'd say so," he replied. "My niece and her family are up in air thanks to you."

_No, _the voice wanted to say. _No families; no mothers that push you away from their computers and papers and no fathers that are never there, that are always off somewhere in the field, the field that in your imagination was a meadow but in reality is scarred with craters and runs red with lifeblood, his lifeblood, the blood of someone you didn't know but you thought was a hero all of the same but someone who came back only to be slaughtered in his own home._

She nodded and was grateful that the trooper with no name could not see beneath her helmet, grateful that he couldn't see that her lower lip was cracked open and bleeding, that her eyes were bloodshot, that her hair, once so carefully gathered at the nape of her neck, was matted perhaps beyond repair. He couldn't see what this was costing her to say something vaguely optimistic, that this war, both external and internal, was sapping her from the inside out. And the people who could understand were the ones she was afraid of seeing.

Now she understood how he had felt that night in the cave.

There was a slight lift in her stomach as the pelican touched down on the landing pad, just enough to recall that sickening feeling of constant weightlessness. It took the doors opening and the hiss of cool air coming to greet her to remind Jennifer that she was on solid ground again, or as solid as ground could get in New Alexandria. It was a precarious perch it felt like: something that could drift in the wind and maybe allow that wind to carry you away. She could already tell that she needed something to remind her, to root her back to where she needed to be.

There he was: a tall figure in familiar blue armor. She paused on the ramp, uncertain of where to begin. Finally: "Hey."

"Hey," he said and she stepped off of the ramp. As the propeller blades began to whip through the air, drowning out all other noise, he added, "Have you eaten?"

"No," she replied, speaking unnecessarily loudly as if to compensate, "but I don't need to."

"You need to," he said with a little bit of the old, familiar tenacity.

Moments later, they were downstairs and Carter had her seated down opposite him at a table in the otherwise abandoned mess hall. "Field rations," he said, depositing a cardboard carton in front of her. "Can't get you better."

She looked at the box but did not move to open it. "How long before they need me again?" she asked.

"Half an hour," he answered, "maybe less." His blue eyes scanned the mess hall again, taking in its emptiness. "Probably less."

She nodded, took off her helmet, set it on the chair beside her. He moved his helmet to a similar position opposite hers, a pair of silent but still stern chaperones. Lifting the carton's lid, she ignored the obvious placement of the main entrée in its silver pouch –she always had thought they were slimy –and dumped the entire contents onto the metal table. Spreading out the individual packets with one hand as though organizing the jewelry she'd never had, she found the one labeled "bread" and then tore open the ones marked as peanut butter and jelly.

"What will they need me for?" she asked him, still not meeting his eyes as she slathered strawberry jam on a bit of white bread. "Do you know?"

"They'll need you for whatever they'll need you for," he answered. "I honestly can't say."

She took a long drink of water. She bit into the bread, chewed, and swallowed with mechanical efficiency. She felt him lean his elbows on the table as he tried again, "They're calling you a hero for what you pulled off today. You saved a lot of people."

"A lot of people died too." She took another bite, chewed, swallowed, and only then did her eyes meet his. "I'm sorry I came back alone."

Carter was quiet. "Make him proud," he finally said after a long moment's thought.

"That's all I can do," she replied with a little, nonchalant shrug. The gesture felt familiar; she took comfort in it. She took comfort in the fact that she hadn't –that she didn't need to –leave everything behind. There was a bag of chips; she yanked that open next. She looked at the cap on her water bottle rather than at him. "I'm almost sorry I came back at all."

"Don't say that." The response was so automatic that she was sure it was counterfeit: a mindless placation. She bit down hard on a chip, felt a sharp edge scrape a path down her throat. He said that now because of what she didn't say, because she hadn't said that it truly could have gone either way, that it really could have been him sitting here eating potato chips if he had let her take the blow. If she had made him let her take the blow.

She took another sip of water; set the bottle down; felt her tongue rub against the backs of her teeth. "Maybe we shouldn't," she said.

"What do you mean?" There was a crease of confusion on his forehead; it was easier to look at that than it was to look at his eyes.

"What happened before…" _Before Jorge died. _"With us…" _And you kissing me outside of the cave. _"This changes everything."

"What does?" he asked.

Now she met his eyes. "The war," she said. "Everything just got a lot harder, a lot more… I don't think we can, not now, not with everything that's going on. We need to fight and I can't be thinking about this, not when there's so much to think about, not with everything that's happened, not with everything that's going to happen."

There was something flickering behind his eyes, some emotion… recognition? For a wild moment, Jennifer wondered if this was the way the conversation with Kat had gone all those months ago. _"Thom's death was a trump on anything that might've or could've been between them," _Jorge had told her weeks ago. She felt her lips quirk slightly at the memory. _"Neither of them was the same."_

_I'm not the same, _she silently whispered to herself. _I need to be a good soldier, like Jorge said. Being a good soldier means that I think about the war, about the greater good, about the whole, and not about me, and not about him. I'm me; I'm Jennifer, but I'm something bigger too. I'm doing the right thing. _

And he knew it too. He wasn't going to fight for her; he was going to let her do this. He was going to let her go and that solidified her resolve. Carter always did the right thing, the Spartan thing.

She got up from the table, grabbed her helmet. "I have to go," she said. "I'm probably needed…"

"Somewhere," he finished for her with a slightly broken smile. "You're probably needed somewhere."

Jennifer nodded, turned, and walked from the mess hall, her helmet braced against her hip. She kept walking; he didn't stop her. She let her go. 


	25. Collateral Damage

**Winterbirth**

_A Halo Fan Fiction by Marianne Bennet_

A/N: Sorry for the delay. Been working on some non-fan fiction projects of late. But I kept thinking about this so I ended up writing out a new chapter in the hallway outside my eye doctor's office. And I wanted to acknowledge a very lovely person who has made some beautiful pieces inspired by Six/Carter and my fic. **Netprincess **put together a very lovely piece of Six and Carter outside the cave from chapter 18 and I love it. See link below (remove spaces after copy/pasting. And as always, much thanks to my loyal beta-reader, **EternalEntity**.

netprincess. deviantart art/Halo-Carter-and-Noble-Six-344928741

**Twenty-five: Collateral Damage**

August 23rd, 2552

The skyscrapers of New Alexandria were still smoldering but Jennifer knew that at least some of them were empty pyres thanks to her efforts. It had been a long day and normally she would have taken pride in her accomplishments, patted her own back, and know that she deserved every word of praise. But New Alexandria was still burning and she was beginning to truly realize that there was nothing she could do to stop the glass.

_But you saved the people, _said a voice in the corner of her mind that sounded suspiciously akin to that of somebody she used to know. _ Cities are people, not buildings. And now we fall back, regroup to fight another day. We lose ground but maybe we'll get that other day and maybe we'll win. But we have to live long enough and make sure the people around us live long enough, especially the ones that mean something._

And now she had to face the people that had begun to mean the most. And, for some strange reason, facing them was more nerve-wracking than flying a Falcon across a burning skyline or coming to terms with the inevitable, whatever the inevitable proved to be in the coming days, hours, minutes; could she even approximate how much time was left? How much time _was_ left, for the war, for Noble Team, for herself, for the all-time team leader and the one-time lone wolf to figure out where they stood? But Jennifer was quick to remind herself that she had put a stop to that last speculation that morning and she had every intention of keeping it that way.

That did little to make things any easier when she did see him again.

Jun was surveying the city's destruction when she slipped into the ruins of the once grand Olympic Tower, her helmet braced against her hip, her step so quiet that she was practically tiptoeing through the shattered glass by Spartan standards. A pair of well cared for binoculars braced against the bridge of his nose, Noble Three was looking outward rather than inward, as Jennifer was beginning to wish she could.

"Look at this place," the sniper said quietly, training his gaze –amplified by a helpful set of lens –from target to target. He might have been talking to Kat as she sat fiddling with the interior of a comm unit, the device gutted by her gloved hands, its mechanized innards scattered across the floor. Jennifer couldn't tell if the lieutenant commander was completing a necessary task or busy work to keep herself distracted. Either way, the Spartan could not blame her counterpart. Jennifer could have done with a distraction herself.

Jun continued his narration: "Alexandria used to be the crown jewel. Beautiful place." He lowered his binoculars, rubbing at his eyes. "Look how that turned out." He looked to Jennifer: her arrival an influx his binoculars had not foreseen. Good thing she was a friendly. "Hey," he said by way of greeting. "You made it."

His tone was pleasant, amiable as always; he might well have been greeting her arrival at a backyard barbecue. Emile seemed to pick up on this; a snort of derision echoing from behind the painted skull, the other warrant officer flipped his kukri around in his hand and sliced at a bit of torn cabling with a newly sharpened blade. "It's a regular family reunion."

The offhand statement became the epicenter of a wave of tension that rolled through the atrium; the wreck of crashed Banshee suspended in the cabling and cords above them seemed to tremble even if the members of Noble Team, their reactions programmed with the familiar charade of Spartan stoicism, did not. The focus was quick to shift, however, from Emile's remark to Jennifer herself. She could feel her face warm as though it were targeted by four pairs of lasers; she was half-tempted to double-check and make sure Jun's sniper rifle was still propped up against the windowsill as it had before and there was no actual red light flickering against her bare face.

Perhaps merciful in his intent, Carter moved, breaking the silence with a rustle of armored plates as he joined Jun at the window. Equally mercifully, he said nothing, his mouth a grim line as he observed the devastation through bare eyes. After a moment, Jun turned back to the skyline as well, although his binoculars were already clipped to his belt and Kat turned her attention back to the disassembled comm unit. Emile did not budge, did not back down, and the red eyes of the painted skull soon proved to be more than twice as arresting as being lazed by anyone's scope. But, in truth, Jennifer wasn't sure which induced more guilt: Noble Four's cavalier, offhand remark or the crimson-eyed intensity of his glower. But what could she do?

She raised her hand, uncurled her fingers, and showed him the dogtags in her palm, the chain slipping between her gloved fingers to dance in the fading sunlight. What else could she do? Emile said nothing; the red eyes seemed to trace the raised lettering, the curve of the _J _and the _O _and the _R_, the swoop of the _G _and the harsh, flat lines of the _E _followed by the numbers she had committed to memory. Emile was silent still, as were the others: at the window, Jun cast a glance over one shoulder, wordless. Kat remained intent on her work, the minute squeak of the turning of a screw the only sound in the atrium besides the sparking wires above. In contrast, Carter was as still as the statues the Covenant had crumbled across the city; Spartans weathered better than stone monuments against the calamities of a newer age.

After a long moment, Emile reached out with the hand holding the knife, the blade pinched between his gloved fingers –_"Don't cut yourself,"_ he had said once before handing the weapon to Kat –and angled the handle against the underside of her outstretched hand, dragging the carved wood against her fingers and pushing the hilt against the knuckles until her hand had closed over the dogtags again.

"Keep 'em," he told her quietly. "He gave them to you." She dropped her closed hand back to her side; he flipped his knife back around, grabbing the handle once more and pointing the blade at his chest. "I'll honor him my own way."

"Get yourself killed that way, Emile," muttered Kat from her seat on the scarred and pocket-marked floor. "If I tell you once, I'll tell you a dozen more times. Stabbing things will end with you getting stabbed."

"Jealous that I'm getting up close and personal with the Covvies?"

There had been a day not too long ago that Kat would have retorted in response, snapped at Emile, listed the number of times he had nearly gotten himself killed just to see the splash of blood on his knife. But the game had changed. The mood had shifted; everything from the tone in Noble Team's respective voices to the sunlight itself seemed to have altered, darkened, as though the imminent change of season on Reach was bleeding into its inhabitants. And sure enough, the shadows had never seemed more obvious on Kat's face as she leaned over her work. For the first time since Jenifer had first met her, the lieutenant commander looked older than her age. She glanced over at Jun and thought for the first time that she could espy wrinkles bisecting his tattoo. Jorge had outdated them all in his forties yet he at the moment of his untimely death would have seemed of an age with this new incarnation of Noble Team.

For his part, Carter looked as worn out as ever as he stood overlooking the city; only Emile with his skull-faced helmet remained seemingly untouched. Or was he? Or was he merely flaunting his inevitable fate, taking the bitterness out of a cold, hard truth by displaying it to the world? For the first time, she –both Jennifer and Six –looked around the room and fully understood that everyone she was looking at would eventually die. It was different than being told in training that they _could _die; that they were being sent into scenarios where death was _probable_. The best any of them could make of it would be to choose when, where, and how, and to make it count, if possible, as Jorge had. Her fingers closed more tightly around the dogtags.

"Jorge always said he would never leave Reach," said Jun to the slowly dimming sky as though he had followed Jennifer's train of thought.

Emile snickered, finally turning away from Jennifer and leaping onto a chunk of a collapsed balcony that had fallen to the lower level. Whipping his knife absentmindedly at a clump of dangling wires, he replied, "The big man always was sentimental. Figures his last action would be a damn sentiment."

"His last action was giving his life thinking he'd just saved the planet," Carter cut in, the first thing he had said, the first time she had heard his voice since she had left that mess hall. He turned to look back at the lot of them save Jun at his side. "We all should be so lucky."

"Lucky to die?" she repeated incredulously before she could stop herself. For the first time since she had walked in, Carter looked at her. She looked back, telling him and _only _him, "Jorge didn't 'give his life' so _we _could 'be so lucky' as to die."

"Six…"

Jennifer ignored Jun, eyes fixed on her commander. "You make it sound so pretty, Carter, so romantic: 'giving his life.' You make it sound like a damn sentiment. Well, I was there. And it wasn't pretty. It wasn't romantic. He let himself get blown up because he figured he had no choice 'cept to have me come home, mission accomplished. That's not a fucking sentiment and that's not 'giving his life.' So don't hype it up like it is."

"That's enough, lieutenant." She had seen Carter snap before, seen him raise his voice, seen him shout, but this cold disappointment trumped all else. "He died fighting for something. It's a dishonor to his memory to act like he didn't."

_He died fighting for something that was already lost, _she wanted to tell him. _He just didn't know it then. _But for some reason she was struck by the fact that such a statement seemed too harsh, too cruel, for this warfront. Carter was still looking at her from across the atrium, his expression half-apprehensive, half daring her to push further, harder, force him, her, all of them to drop the charade. But she didn't. She backed down, for her sake as much as theirs.

There was something else hovering between the members of Noble Team in this ruined atrium with the Banshee swinging precariously above them with every distant or not so distant blast. Out of the corner of her eye, Jennifer thought she saw Kat and Jun exchange a glance before Jun asked Carter: "Sir, is it true that Gauntlet, Red, and Echo Teams have been assigned to civilian evac ops?"

His reaction was immediate; the commander looked to his lieutenant commander. "Those are senior level communiques."

"I hear what I hear." Kat looked back at him, her expression as frank as her tone and choice of words. "Point is, why are we putting Spartans on defensive deployments?"

"_We're_ not putting anyone on anything. _We're_ the ones being deployed. Or going to be deployed, if you could get me that link to SATCOM already…"

"I'm chasing it, but what am I supposed to make of a console that has more shrapnel than transceivers?"

"A link. Which I need _now, _Kat."

"You're not answering my question."

"You're not getting me my link."

"Answer it."

Carter was quiet and Jennifer was certain he was bearing the weight of all four of Noble Team's other surviving members' gazes as they awaited the answer to Kat's question, to the question that they all had but only she so bluntly voiced. But he had to answer, knew he had to answer, knew he owed it to them, all of them, to answer, but he answered with another question: "You want to know if we're losing?"

Jennifer was instantly reminded of that night so many days ago, where Carter had been keeping watch in another makeshift safe house and he had turned to her and asked, _"What do you do when you think you're losing?" _and she hadn't known what to say. But it had been different then; one supercarrier –even a supercarrier like the _Long Night of Solace –_was only one supercarrier arriving after what had been a victory. And one supercarrier was not an entire fleet dropped on their heads when they had already expended their resources to defeat the latest threat; when they had already sacrificed Jorge. So this time, it wasn't a matter of wondering if they were losing…

"I want to know if we've lost," Kat replied, meeting his gaze steadily.

But no one seemed to have an answer for that: not Jun, the eternal realist, not Emile with his eternal sarcasm, not even Jennifer herself, although she thought she saw Carter's gaze flicker towards her for a moment and she thought for that same moment that maybe he remembered that conversation in the mouth of the cave too. But he said nothing along with the rest and was mercifully rescued from having to say something by the arrival of static and comm chatter that could only mean more bad news.

"…_near the southwest quadrant of the city, over? Sierra Two-Five-Nine, if you are receiving, I am authorizing override of radio security protocols to link with this channel._"

"How long for a secure link?" Carter asked Kat.

Noble Two was staring down at the comm unit in her hands, an expression akin to shock washing over her face. "Colonel Holland? What's he playing at, hailing us over an open channel?"

"Kat." He took a few steps forward, snapping his fingers at her to get her attention. Jennifer felt a strange twist somewhere between her lungs. "Secure link. Now."

She threw up her hands as static continued to blare from the still untapped channel. "You're asking for miracles. 'Secure' doesn't exist anymore."

Running a hand through his hair, Carter let out a sigh of pure exasperation. "Make it exist." Kat glared up at him. He sighed again. "Could the Covenant trace it back to us?"

"_I _could." Jennifer couldn't help but roll her eyes slightly at Kat's response and caught Jun's eye. The sniper offered her a smirk, which she returned somewhat half-heartedly. "Besides, are you planning to stick around here?" Kat continued.

"_Noble Leader, this is a Priority One hail. If you are receiving, acknowledge immediately._"

"Immediately," Emile mimicked under his breath but no one laughed. Kat tossed the comm's earpiece to Carter who caught it as she told him to keep things brief. He shrugged, lifted the device to his ear, and paced off in the direction of the staircase across the room, speaking quietly enough that Jennifer could not hear him. At the window, Jun refocused the lens on his binoculars and then dropped his arms slightly, looking through the glass with bare eyes, frowning, before replacing the binoculars. "Looks like we've got movement. Multiple Covenant vehicles are vacating the area."

Jennifer joined him at his vantage point, bracing her DMR against the sill and looking through the scope. Observing a grunt shuffling across broken pavement to clamber into a Banshee and the jackal more gracefully following suit, she commented, "Looks like they've got places to be."

"Doesn't seem like a redeployment though," replied Jun, zooming in himself. "Plenty of things left for them to try and kill in this sector, namely ourselves." He smirked.

"Offended?" Jennifer inquired, looking over at him.

He smirked again. "Maybe slightly."

"Don't get your hopes up," interjected Emile with uncharacteristic foresight. "How often do you see Covvies run away for no reason?"

"Tactical retreat?" Jennifer suggested.

"Still gotta have a reason to make it 'tactical.'"

"Radiation flare!" Kat said suddenly, cutting off Jennifer's retort before it even begun. All heads save Carter's and Kat's own turned in the lieutenant commander's direction. Eyes darting back and forth between readings displayed on her armguard's display, Kat rattled off numbers: "Twenty… thirty… forty roentgens!" She looked up and toward the window as though she could see the flare's source with her bare eyes alone, her face unusually pale. "Guess we can assume what they're running from."

Across the atrium, Carter removed and readjusted the earpiece Kat had given him before walking back over to them, saying, "Just lost Holland. What the hell is going on?"

Kat paused in her recitation of the readings. "Atomic excitement scrambled the signal." She glanced back down at her armguard. "Ninety million now!"

"Source?" Carter demanded as Jun set aside his binoculars and slipped his helmet back over his head.

"Airborne," was the answer. "Close," she added after the briefest of moments.

"How close are we talking about?" Noble's commander pressed as he buckled his own helmet back into place. "Miles? Yards?"

Had she been looking at anyone else, Kat's expression would have turned to something like scorn. Still, her response more than made up for it. "If it were yards, we'd be dead."

Jennifer had just opened her mouth to say something when the shockwave hit. In the flash of an instant, the ground was inches rather than feet from her eyes, palms braced against the rubble, Jorge's dogtags and chain splayed out inches from her fingers. She blinked once and then twice, ears ringing and vision flickering; Jun had hit the ground beside her and she turned to look at him, instantly coming face to face with his scout's visor. For the first time in what felt like a while, she wished she had her own helmet permanently welded to her armor.

She snatched up the dogtags, shoved them into the compartment of her armor that already housed the ONI datacard, before getting back up unsteadily. Around her, Carter and Jun did the same and Emile sprung up to his feet, as lithe as ever, having been sitting and therefore never been knocked down in the first place. In contrast, Kat scrambled to retrieve her helmet as Jennifer donned her own; the younger female Spartan coughing slightly as she said, "_That _close."

The ground was shaking, her legs were shaking, she was running in unstable and unfamiliar territory and her helmet was doing little to block the screech of Covenant ships outside the tower. The Banshee trembled above Noble Team as they stumble-sprinted towards the dual elevators, weapons in hand. Jennifer's DMR was secure in her grip, what remained of her stock of grenades was equally safe on her belt, but they weren't running to _fight_. This time, Noble Team was running to _run_.

_There has to be a time when you stop running, when you turn and face whatever is chasing you," _she remembered Carter telling her once, just before they had departed on the semi-suicidal run to the Sabre launch facility –"suicidal"? What a pathetic adjective to describe a Spartan operation –but as Jennifer turned to look across the room at her commander as Kat fumbled with the elevator controls, she grimly noted that the time to stop running and turn and fight was not now, not here, in a ruined city with the glassing ships overhead, with everything they had been trying to stop since day one on Viery on their heads. If the suicide super soldiers were turning and running, then this had to truly be the moment when they –Holland, Halsey, Carter, Kat, Jennifer –could truly mark the hour of their defeat.

Kat shut the elevator door behind Jennifer, albeit with a moment of fumbling at the controls –uncharacteristic Kat, Jennifer vaguely noted but was more preoccupied with reloading her DMR; she had no idea what was waiting for them downstairs. God knew the Covenant would eagerly fight suicide soldiers with suicide soldiers. But it took her a moment as the elevator zoomed downwards in a perfect parallel to its mate that housed Carter, Jun, and Emile that her hands were still shaking as she attempted to install a new cartridge.

"First glassing?" asked Kat wryly before sliding her helmet on to conceal her grim smile. Jennifer didn't answer. "Me too." Jennifer vaguely recalled a conversation where Kat called herself a newbie and smiled faintly under the helmet, all the while trying to shake her feeling of dread.

"_Kat. Options._"

"Best bet's a fallout bunker in Sublevel Two. Ninety-six meters northeast." And, of course refusing to give up her usual give and take with her commander: "We get orders from Holland?"

"_We're being redeployed to Sword Base._" And, judging from Carter's tone as it crackled over the channel, he wasn't very pleased about it.

"_Sword?_" Jun chimed in this time, his tone incredulous. "_That's… not exactly ours anymore._"

"_Sword Base is the Covvies' bitch now._"

"_Which is why they want us for a torch and burn op now,_" explained Carter, slightly exasperated himself and choosing not to argue with Emile's assessment. In the adjacent elevator, Jennifer leaned the forehead of her helmet against the right wall and sighed heavily. "_Keep Halsey's excavation data out of enemy hands._"

Kat grumbled as the elevator doors slid open. "If it hasn't already," she muttered.

Jennifer's eyes scanned the open ground lying between them and the bunker's entrance. It looked clear; surely enough, Carter, Emile, and Jun had managed to get more than halfway across without interference. She and Kat quickly darted forward, sprinting to catch up. Ahead of them, Carter answered Kat's muttering with: "_Holland swears up and down that the Covenant are still looking for something there._"

"He can swear up and down as much as he likes," Kat refused to back down as Noble Team save herself and Jennifer reached the bunker's entrance. Jennifer felt a prickling at the back of her neck but ignored it; they were so close. Four more strides, three more, and maybe they'd be untouchable, the glass couldn't get to them. They could stop running.

Kat continued: "I don't know where he gets off calling a torch and burn Priority One–"

And then Kat stopped talking, cut off midsentence. It was such a quiet thing –the absence of the lieutenant commander's voice in her ear drew Jennifer's attention more than the thump as Kat's armored body hit the ground, a star-shaped hole, a splintering sunburst of fractured glass where here once immaculately polished visor used to be. A split second glance back toward the bunker's entrance revealed Carter in his familiar blue armor darting forward, assault rifle in hand, taking blind shots at the Phantom hovering above them, the ghost none of them had foreseen or noticed in the heat of the moment, of the argument. It hadn't even been a firefight that had distracted them; it was an argument over a comm channel but in truth, what could any of them have done anyway? What could they do now, as the Phantom swooped away and out of range?

Carter looked as though he wanted to run to Kat's body and to the alive Jennifer beside it but Jun had placed himself deliberately in his commander's path, probably to keep Noble Leader from doing something desperate and putting himself in unnecessary harm's way. So Jennifer did what Carter could not; she hoisted Kat's lifeless body up by the waist and dragged them both –dead soldier and living soldier –towards the bunker. She wasn't even sure which one of them was weighing them down anymore but she kept moving forward, a strange imitation of some kind of funeral procession with no coffin and a single pallbearer. But Jennifer did not stop moving forward until the shadow of the bunker enveloped them all and Emile hit the panel to slam the blast doors shut.

She gently lay Kat's body down on the floor and then leaned back onto her haunches. In the pitch black darkness –none of them had hit the lights yet –illuminated only by the glow of her visor's night vision settings, she watched as Carter pulled off his helmet and crumpled to his knees beside his lieutenant commander, hands darting out across her chest plate and wrists as though to check vitals. Jennifer could have told him it was useless, that she was gone, but she did not. She looked up at Emile and Jun, still standing, silent spectators, and then back at Carter. In the green glow of night vision, they all looked like ghosts.


	26. Deeper Water

**Winterbirth**

_A Halo Fan Fiction by Marianne Bennet_

A/N: Again, sorry for the delay. Working on revising a screenplay and writing a new full-length play (yikes). But this chapter along with the next are ones I've been looking forward to writing for a very long time.

**Twenty-six: Deeper Water**

August 2552

Carter was in mourning.

She was trying not to watch him but doing so was easier said than done. It was a sometime paradox: do you stop by the smoldering wreck to try and save the injured, knowing that you could possibly do more harm by doing what you consider good? She tried to liken it to her loss of Jorge, to make it the same, to provide comparison. Would she have wanted comfort, had there been someone to provide it? But it was not the same and she was so certain she could do nothing.

But she couldn't help but watch him so she edited her efforts into trying not to make it obvious. She did not want to make him feel like an animal in a cage, an exhibit to be observed, a study in grief. There was too much of that already; the four Spartans amongst the civilians were like the crows that had once perched upon the limbs of a tree outside what had been Jennifer's bedroom window: ungainly and cumbersome in direct contrast to the delicate quivering of sparrows and songbirds. They were less human than they had ever been before; the power was being conserved and so none of them were about to surrender the power of sight granted by their helmet, not even Jennifer.

There was green light in her eyes: the ghostly emerald of night vision that turned Spartan and civilian alike into specters floating amongst patches of darkness. And there was her commander, in a spectral patch of his own, slumped against the wall, his DMR lying on the floor beside him. A quick look tracked down Kat –what had been Kat –in a place of honor: a metal table cleared of whatever it had carried before its current charge of a corpse. She had not had to look far; Carter had not let the body out of his sight in… in however long it had been. The tracking of time did not seem worth the effort of bringing up a clock on her helmet's interface. After all, she didn't want to know how long Carter had been in pieces; she wanted to know how long it would take her commander to sew himself back together and get back to being the commander again. And there was only one way to find that out.

"We've lost."

It seemed that she heard him speak the words long before she crossed the antechamber of the bunker and sat down beside him but it took all the time and more for their weight to sink in, seep through the armor, dissolve against her warmed flesh and turn it cold again. Jennifer shivered. But it was not unpleasant to hear the words, strangely enough. It made her oddly content, as though she had been twisted up in knots, coiled like a spring, waiting for, dying for, someone to finally admit:

"We've lost?" she repeated. It was stranger still that she could feel all of this resignation, this relief at calling the world what it was, and yet her automatic response –she didn't even think before it came out –was denial and disbelief. Spartan conditioning had done a number on her after all. "How do you figure?"

"There were twelve hundred military units on the Grafton alone," was the flat reply. "Gone. New Alexandria had a population of approximately 100,000. Also gone. In less than a week. That's about a seventh of Reach's total population. How long do you think it will take the Covenant to finish the job? A month?"

"We got the civilian transports out," was her immediate protest albeit a halfhearted one.

"With a total evacuation of…" He trailed off, shaking his head. "I don't want to do the math. I don't even want to look up the numbers anymore. It's pathetic. We're pathetic."

"We're not pathetic!" she found herself snapping weakly, again as though by reflex, as though she knew these were the words that Jennifer should say and these were the motions that Jennifer should make but Jennifer wasn't really in them anymore. "We're losing but we haven't lost."

"We were losing," he corrected bitterly, "and now we've lost."

Carter fell quiet again. For the first time, Jennifer realized their isolation. The quiet. There were quiet murmurings from the civilians huddled at the other side of the bunker; there was a slight grinding noise from an opposite corner where Emile worked away, whetting his favored kukri. There was Jun, close to the bunker's massive doorway, but he had never been one for chatter or needless noise. And there was what had been Kat, as silent as Jun, lying upon her pyre of sorts, shaming them all with her true Spartan serenity.

And then, as though Noble Two's absence had not already been weight enough, Carter had to go and say: "I wouldn't tell her."

It was a moment before Jennifer found her voice. "Wouldn't tell her what?"

"That we had lost," was the answer. "She kept asking and asking, that entire day, that evening, up until… up until the last. And I wouldn't tell her. I didn't want to. She couldn't make me; I couldn't make myself. So I didn't." His helmet turned in her direction. "But you already knew."

"Yeah," she agreed after another moment of searching for her vocal cords. "I knew."

"You knew," he repeated and the helmet turned away again.

They sat there for a time and then suddenly, catching her by surprise, she felt her old brand of humor flare up again. "Do you know what I thought when I first came back, hiked all the way out of the desert?" she found herself asking. "I thought, 'Welcome home, Jennifer. The world is ending.'"

She heard his dark chuckle in response and a wave of relief washed over her. "Your timing was pretty bad," he admitted. "But, to be honest, I'm not sure it had that much of an effect on you. You didn't just already know; you _always _knew, didn't you?"

"People aren't supposed to know the ending of the story," she replied with a shrug to hide the flare of salt on a fresh wound. "It's what the psychic at the side of the road told me anyway. Turns them into kamikazes. Besides, if the client already knows, that's no good for business."

"You're not answering my question."

"I had a _hunch_," she griped in response, "that's not _knowing_." He didn't reply and she fell quiet as well, until, seeking to repair the damage, she admitted, "There were a few moments when I thought it wouldn't turn out like this."

"There were moments when I wished," Carter remarked in return. "There were moments when I hoped, moments when I lost hope, moments when I got it back. You know," he stated quietly and her mind instantly went back to that cave, to that conversation, to that… thing that had happened. "So it wasn't so bad for me, knowing how badly we were losing, knowing that we'd lost. But it was different for Kat. See, she _believed_ where you and I just maybe on and off hoped. She was so sure that she would find a way; that there would be a way. That day in New Alexandria when she started asking me if we had lost; that was new. And I didn't want to tell her so I didn't."

"You wanted to protect her," Jennifer said quietly, retreating into herself even as she realized. It was Kat that needed Carter's protection, not Jennifer who was too cynical for her own good from the start, never Jennifer who always knew the end was coming. It was Kat that had believed and it was Kat that had died and now it would be Kat that would be forever immortalized in Carter's eyes. Not Jennifer. Never Jennifer. It would always be Kat.

"I guess I did," he said, equally quiet. "And then she got shot in the skull by the thing she didn't see coming. She didn't get it. She didn't get that we were losing, that we could die. Just like her arm all over again. Except this time it's my fault and this time it was her life. Because she came to me looking for understanding, to try and get it this time, and I wanted to protect her."

She could feel Carter retreat into himself now, just as she had done moments before, and this time she did not offer comfort. She did not offer protection. She did not tell him to take his helmet off, remind him of his humanity. She had realized that she needed all of those things for herself now, that being the one that no one thought needed protection, she needed shelter all the more.


	27. Novocain

**Winterbirth**

_A Halo Fan Fiction by Marianne Bennet_

A/N: Sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry for the delay in chapters. I'm currently studying abroad and trying to learn a new language and, alack, languages do not come easily to me. The good news is that I've got lots of inspiration from lots of long walks around the most beautiful city in Europe, so I should be updating much more frequently.

**Twenty-seven: Novocain**

August 28th, 2552

Jun lit up the beacon but Jennifer was already wondering if it was useless to try and signal for rescue. The ruined city was still smoldering around them; would one plume of smoke be so different amongst the columns of steam rising up from the recent glassing? As though privy to her thoughts, the sniper turned around; his helmet's visor focused in her direction as though offering up a crooked smile.

"Worth a shot," Jun threw over his shoulder, careless in delivery, as though ignoring the fact that their longing for rescue was as tangible as the debris floating in the air around them. They were looking for proof, she knew that now, that they –Spartans –were worth the effort of recovery, that they would not be thrown away like a child's old toy when he gets a new present.

"Don't expect much," she replied, this time not because she had a reputation to upkeep, but because it would be too painful to say anything else. She would have gone further, accused him of abandoning his "realist" ways –the retort was at the tip of her tongue behind the visor –but something stopped her. Memory: Kat had been the one to call him a pessimist. He had accused her of optimism in turn. She had said she had known the odds. Had she understood them? Too late now to really know.

She dimly realized that Jun had taken a few steps closer. In fact, he seemed very close: an illusion maintained by the exaggerated lines that the Spartan armor created. "Good," he said quietly to her, "because optimism is denial."

The phrase struck the same familiar chord and she felt herself turn away, begin to look toward the shelter from which they had emerged, felt her gaze stop midway to the archway. She wanted to look away but she didn't want to look to the past. Nor to the future either; it was too uncertain and there was nothing solid to focus on. So Jennifer settled her gaze midway between as Jun continued:

"Might be even worse. Puffs you up; makes you think you've got something there. Makes it all the worse when you figure out you got nothing. Make sure you realize you've got nothing to begin with. It takes away the fall."

"You don't think I already know this?" she asked him quietly in return.

"I think you'd better keep remembering."

"How can I forget?" she replied, her voice suddenly barely manageable. "How can any of us forget, now that all of this," she waved her hand, the gesture encompassing the smoldering ruins, the beacon, and the body all at once, "has happened?"

"Maybe not," Jun allowed. "But don't try and tell me that you don't want to."

"Spent most of my life remembering, Jun," she answered with a bitter smile clearly manifested in her tone. "Maybe I want a change."

"I'm not a big fan of homeostasis myself," he admitted, "especially if the norm's gonna be this from now on," he nodded at the burning city, "but I'd rather not play pretend. We ain't going to win this."

"I'm no leader of men," Jennifer replied curtly, "just like you aren't either. But I'm pretty damn sure that that attitude takes us halfway to defeat." And then she turned on her heel and walked away.

Emile and Carter were both standing guard over… over the body; Emile less obviously than the commander, but clearly watching over all the same. They were, as always, a study in contrasts. Where Carter was curves, Emile was all straight lines: the right angle of his knee above the foot braced perpendicular to a bit of flattened city, the acute bisection of the shotgun and assault rifle at his back, the jaunty line of his kukri thrust into the scabby bark of a dead tree. Jennifer found her eyes drawn instead to the slump of Carter's shoulders, the arc of his arm looped around the body as he lowered what used to be Kat to the ground.

Before she could redirect her thoughts, her attention was tugged downward to the body itself. She found herself wondering if there was a star-shaped hole in the face beneath the helmet or if whatever had been hidden beneath the Spartan armor had been mangled beyond resemblance, just as whatever had mentally existed beyond the Spartan charade had been snuffed out of being.

Jun had followed her steps, her gaze, and, once again, her thoughts. "Now you see," he said and the words felt like a warm breath on her shoulder: surprising, yet somehow comforting.

"I'm looking," she replied. "The two pretty much go hand in hand."

"Yet there's a difference," he pointed out. "I don't think any of us were looking for _this_." With a wave of his gloved hand, he included the entire view –Carter, body, city, Emile, Jun, Jennifer –in that sentiment. "But no one can say we didn't see it coming. Not anymore."

She bit down on her lower lip. "But where do we go from here?"

"We do what we always do," answered Jun with a shrug, looking back at the smoking beacon. "We wait for orders. What else is there to do?"

"What else is there?" she repeated and knew that her voice echoed his bitter tone.

Message conveyed, Jun nodded a farewell of sorts and retired to clamber up upon a miniature mountain of scrap, playing look-out with the scope of his rifle. She turned in his direction to watch: an instant mistake. The sun was blinding; she didn't know how he could stand it.

She cast her gaze elsewhere with difficulty; there was much to see, but few places she wanted to look. See Jun, keeping vigil over a city no longer worth fighting over. See Emile, tense, as taut and dangerous as a loaded weapon when there was no enemy in sight anymore, looking for vengeance no longer within firing range. See Carter, on his knees like a marionette, the puppet Halsey had once likened him to, with his strings all snipped. See Kat, that wasn't Kat anymore. See Jennifer, looking without wanting to.

She shut her eyes and all the world dropped dead.

…

Funerals had become a luxury of another time. In a hub of survivors, what was to be done about the dead? Amongst the crowd that had greeted Noble Team's arrival in one of the few Pelicans that had lingered in the skies near New Alexandria, Jennifer had caught sight of a few resentful bordering on angry glances as Carter walked through, Kat's body still cradled in his arms. She felt her mouth open for a rebuke and then quickly shut, thinking better. After all, who had any of them had to leave behind, dead or alive?

The body was quickly taken from them; Kat was gone even before her teammates-turned-pallbearers had a chance to remove their helmets. Carter had resisted at first, armored gloves scratching against battered turquoise plates. Emile had protested, his crimson painted eyes seeming to burn with indignation. But they had an audience and Carter's grip loosened as Jun rested a hand upon his commander's shoulder and Emile fell quiet. They stood and watched as the turquoise-clad body faded from sight into the crowd.

None of them seemed to know what to say. It seemed one burden had been taken from their shoulders and replaced by a second, heavier, and invisible one. They stood there a time –it felt like an eternity to Jennifer –motionless, like statues in a garden. But when a UNSC trooper brushed up against Jun, forcing the sniper to step to the side, the surviving Noble Team seemed to come alive again.

"We didn't even get a chance to…" muttered Jun before he trailed off into half-snorted assumed curses in a language Jennifer didn't know.

"The bastards," Emile growled in agreement.

"Doesn't matter," Carter suddenly spoke up. Three Spartan helmets turned in surprise at the sound; it was the first time he had spoken as himself in hours it seemed. Jennifer didn't count the mechanical responses he had uttered in return to the queries of Command upon their arrival at the complex.

"Like hell it doesn't matter!" Emile objected.

Carter turned on him. "We're moving out soon. We might just have a few hours before we're dropped back into the hot zone. Get some rest so you can honor her 'your own way' so you don't dishonor her by getting yourself killed!"

Jennifer could hear her heartbeat in the silence that followed. The hostility between the two Spartans seemed to transcend their armor; a veritable heat filled the air. Both men seemed poised to spring, ready to tackle each other, fight it out. That could not be allowed to happen; somehow, Jennifer was certain that that would be the greater dishonor to their deceased lieutenant commander and friend.

"Knock it off!" Both of their heads snapped in her direction as she stepped between them. Carter lunged forward at her movement; perhaps the fact that he was "seeing red" so to speak had caused him to think her movement had been Emile's. Her arm lashed out in response, palm braced hard against his chest-plate. She turned to glare at him; her visor was reflected in his. It was difficult to say which frightened her more: the man himself or the image of her crimson armor projected onto him.

"Knock it off," she repeated, half-snarling through clenched teeth, turning to look at Emile. "You really think this is gonna do anyone any good, do you? You're soldiers," she began before turning back to Carter. "Act like it."

With that, she shoved her commander back and away from her; Emile didn't budge an inch, but then again he hadn't been pushed. Carter had, and he took two steps toward her in retaliation. "That's funny, coming from you," he growled.

Suddenly feeling cramped for air, her gloved fingers darted to the seals on her neck, unlocking them and yanking her helmet overhead. Her hair came tumbling down her neck in copper snarls; she didn't notice. Fixing her eyes on him, she smirked her typical Six smirk, drawling, "It's a sad day when it has to, isn't it, commander?"

Carter pulled his own helmet off at her words; it clattered to the floor but no one stooped to retrieve it. His eyes bore holes into her own; if her gaze had cared to leave his, which it refused to, it could have traced the lines of his right arm to the tightening fist of his hand. But she didn't need to look to know it was there; she could see it in his face. She had seen it before, this juxtaposition of wondering if he was going to hit her or kiss her, and they both knew it.

_"I don't know what it is about you, if it's what you say or what you do; hell, maybe it's just the way you look at me. You make me angry and, even with everything that's going on, not much will do that. I'm used to keeping my calm. Something about you gets under my skin and it's hard to believe that you're not doing it on purpose."_

"Well," she said, speaking when he did not. "Go on."

His glare deepened and, for a moment, she thought he actually might go through with it, whatever she was taunting him to do. But then he stopped and for some reason, she was disappointed.

Carter looked away from her, to Jun and Emile, his clenched hand falling open again, his stance relaxing. "Food, then bed, all of you," he said quietly to them all before his eyes settled on her again. "That's an order, lieutenant."

She let her smirk fade into a more ironic expression as she clapped her heels together and saluted him. "Yes, sir," she rattled off and heard Jun snort in response.

"_You're really good at it."_

Carter's expression did not change. "Dismissed," he told her and that was her cue to take her leave.

…

Later that evening, it was evidenced that there were other, more personal battles to deal with in the meantime before the lieutenant was once again face to face with the Covenant. It was not until she was staring at her reflection in the wall to wall mirror above the sinks in the communal washrooms that Jennifer realized the state of her hair.

The days since the gamble on supercarrier without respite for personal hygiene had taken its toll physically, as if mental trauma was not sufficient. Sweat and dust were easily rinsed away; her hair was another matter entirely. Grimacing at her gray-eyed alter ego in the mirror, dressed in little more than a long mesh shirt and her smalls, Jennifer reached back to the nape of her neck and threaded her fingers through the greasy strands before giving an experimental tug: her hypothesis was quickly proven. The shoulder-blade length mantle, her secret defiance, that which had been her pride, had now become knot after knot of tangles and snarls.

It was a veritable rat's nest, or so Jennifer decided as she extricated her fingers from the matted locks with some care. She sighed quietly, eyes drifting to the object on the sink's edge. She had anticipated this eventuality, and had prepared for it, not wanting to be seen making the trek back to her bunk to fetch her knife. With another sigh, trying to conjure up determination rather than regret, she unsheathed the blade, and then set aside the weapon once more, turning her neck to contemplate what could be saved.

The thought almost made her laugh out loud. Here she was, trying to figure out what she could save of her hair –such a useless and aesthetic and therefore fundamentally selfish thing to do –when she should be thinking of how she could save Reach. _That _conjured up an actual, literal laugh; she braced one palm against the sink's edge, head bowing as she dissolved into harsh laughter. After all, it was indeed laughable that she could even for a moment entertain the thought that she could save a planet when she had been so feeble and inept that she could not save the woman who had been running alongside her in an open courtyard where she had had every opportunity to glance upward and spot the Banshee, slap Kat on the arm and bark at her to switch on her shields, do _something_ –anything! But she had not.

Still chuckling bitterly, her bare hand –it was so strange to see her own skin all of a sudden –curled around the hilt of her knife once more, its counterpart plucking at the delicate hairs at the nape of her neck. Maybe if she tugged a little, worked the knots downward some, she might still be able to pass as a female…

"What the hell are you doing?"

The knife fell from her hand, clattering into the bed of the sink. It had slipped in her grip before falling; specks of scarlet stained the brushed metal counter. She cursed –she wasn't used to handling her own weapon without the protection of her gloves –and then cursed again, three times over, shaking her hand to shake off the pain, ignoring more internal wounds. Finally, her eyes met his icy blue ones in the mirror. "What the hell do you think _you_'re doing, sneaking up on me like that?"

"Last I checked, there was nothing in the roster about you having your own personal spa, lieutenant," replied Carter brusquely. He too was dressed down, so to speak: loose pants and a mesh shirt not unlike her own. "What are you doing?"

She opened her mouth for an angry retort but stopped when she looked down, saw the knife, her blood spotting the sink, and her bare wrists, and realized what it _looked _like she was doing. "We've got another casualty of war, commander," she said shortly instead, turning on the sink to rinse away the specks of blood and drown her racing heartbeat. "I'm afraid it's beyond saving. Mercy killing."

"What the hell are you talking about?" Carter snapped and Jennifer realized that her words had done very little to help the situation.

"My hair," she clarified, shutting off the water and shaking her hands. The droplets flew everywhere, dotting the blade of her knife. She scowled at them, but continued. "Crying shame but it's gotta go."

"You're cutting your hair?" he asked and his face did something she had not expected. There had been a little crease between his eyebrows; instead of dissolving, it deepened.

"I'm cutting my hair," she confirmed, turning his question into a statement. "Snip, snip. Or would be, if I had scissors. I don't." She paused; the prospect of actually doing the deed pooled in her stomach, turning to lead. "It's just dead stuff," she said and wasn't sure of who she was really talking to. "It doesn't hurt. No nerve endings in the stuff. Like fingernails and I never saw the point in growing those long let alone painting them. Doesn't hurt."

"No one's making you cut your hair," he said quietly and his comment confused her.

"It's making me," she tried to joke. "I mean, look at it. It's practically begging to be euthanized here. Mercy killing, like I said."

"Don't cut your hair," he said in that same quiet voice and that remark made her angry.

"Excuse me?" she said, bristling. "I don't seem to remember asking your opinion. Or anyone's."

"You got it for free," he replied dryly. "Lucky you. Don't cut your hair."

"Are you issuing me an order, commander? Going to put it in the Noble Team handbook or something?" She turned around to glare at the man and not the reflection in the mirror. He met her gaze evenly but she was not to be deterred. "Is it gonna be in small print or bold print that 'Noble Six is not permitted to cut off her Goddamn hair' because I never pay attention to the normal size font."

"You don't really want to do it," Carter replied with a shrug. "I don't want you to either, but you've never cared what I wanted so pointing that out would be useless."

She was taken aback for a moment before recovering. "Reverse psychology," she noted. "Thought you and Jun had already classified me as a psychopath. Look, how would you even know whether or not I wanted this?"

"Because if you did, you'd have already done it," he answered with another shrug.

"Somebody interrupted me," she pointed out.

"As if that changed a thing. My being here wouldn't have made a difference. In fact, it'd probably have made you even more pleased. You'd have stood there, smirking at me, as you sawed the length off and then would've walked out. Isn't that so?" She felt herself flush. He smirked at her: an atypical Carter expression. "Right. I'll be on my way then."

Jennifer didn't answer as he turned to leave, her eyes fixed at a speck on the wall she wasn't sure was even really there. After a moment, Carter stopped in the doorway. "By the way," he started and she thought she saw the hint of that same smirk in a bit of mirror, "you have my full permission as commander to cut your hair or curl it into ringlets or twist it into dreadlocks or whatever you damn well want to do with it. Cut it all off if you really want to."

"But I don't?" she couldn't resist interjecting.

He shrugged. "Or maybe I just don't want you to. But it's your choice."

And then he was gone. She stared at the empty doorway for a few, long moments, considering, before she turned her attention back to the knife and the sink. Carefully, methodically, she took a paper towel from the dispenser and wiped the drops of water from the blade. That being done, she looked back up at her reflection, turning her head this way and that to reassess the damage. It truly was a mess. It might be irreparable and anything but taking the knife to it would be a pipe dream.

"_It might not be easy," he said in a voice that seemed to contain more bleakness than joy, "but it might just be worth it."_

She tugged one lock free of the matted mass and held it to her nose before wincing at the smell.

…

Skin still damp from the showers, she heard the clink of glass before she saw them. Jennifer had been headed to her room –now it was the residence of her alone –when she heard Emile's voice call out from the darkness of the corridor beyond.

She followed and found Jun and Emile in the dim light of a dead end. Looking to the latter, she asked, "Are you supposed to be the ghost of Christmas Past, Present, or Future? Take your pick; Jun would be a shoe-in for any of them easy."

"Are you calling yourself Scrooge?" Jun asked with a snort.

But before she could get out even a single "bah humbug," Emile interjected. "They'll be none of that here," the warrant officer growled, waving a mason jar of milky clear liquid. "Drink up, soldier, They wouldn't give us a funeral so we're cutting straight to the wake."

"Emile made a new friend," Jun explained. "Mechanic. Strikes me as the scum of Reach, no idea how he's managed to keep himself in one piece, but he's got himself a still and he brews a pretty impressive moonshine."

"That probably is the reason he's still around."

"Good guess, soldier-girl."

"You aren't calling me 'newbie' anymore," Jennifer commented, looking at Emile.

"Don't tell me you miss it."

"Like a rock in my shoe," she retorted. "Just wondering what changed."

Emile didn't immediately answer. Jun didn't comment either. Finally, Emile replied, "No such thing as a newbie on this planet anymore."

With that sobering thought, Jennifer took a seat beside Jun and reached for one of the sealed jars on the floor, unscrewing the cap: a remedy. Setting the lid aside, she asked, "So whose brilliant idea was it to set up camp in a dormitory hallway?"

"Dead end," Jun pointed out. "Nobody comes here. There are all kinds of sneaky little tricks in this place: uneven steps on the stairs, corridors that lead to nowhere. Strategic relics of the time of knights and princesses, or so I've been told."

"Yeah, right," Emile scoffed. "You point out a princess around here that fits the job description and I'll be mighty impressed."

"Strategic, like I said," continued Jun. "Built so that if the enemy gets in, they don't know the layout and we can corner them instead of them cornering us."

"Also conveniently provides places to drink banned beverages," Jennifer observed, taking a shallow sip from her jar.

"Gonna go play tattletale, soldier-girl?" Emile taunted. "Give us a nice little salute as we're drummed backward out of the service?"

She coughed violently, the liquid burning down her throat. "Not I," she protested. "Don't you know me well enough by now? Besides, it's become pretty clear to me that we've become indispensable at this point."

"We could thumb our nose at the colonel and call him a bastard or worse: by his Christian name." Emile widened his eyes in mock terror. "And worse that could happen is we're sent to bed without dinner."

"With the quality of the rations being handed out, I'm not sure your stomach would know the difference," said Carter from somewhere in the dark space behind Jennifer.

"Commander," said Jun.

Jennifer nearly choked on her third sip of moonshine. Emile smirked at her; she glared back. Wiping her sleeve across her mouth, she turned to Carter and thrust the mason jar up at him. "We're having a wake. Want some?"

For a moment, she thought he would refuse. But then Carter did, as he often seemed to, something she did not expect of him. He took the jar and sat down between her and Jun, wincing as he took a long drink. To Emile, he asked, "Where'd you find all this?"

"Why are you looking at me?"

"You're usually the one who finds the booze." Carter shrugged. "Not gonna court-martial any of you."

Emile shrugged. "What can I say? I went out to the scrap heap where all of the mechanics were too scared of the Covvies to go, found some parts, traded them to the guy with the still. Heroics."

"Heroics," agreed Carter dryly. "You're trying to have a wake?"

"Emile's trying to have a reason to drink," Jun clarified.

"Emile doesn't need a reason to drink," said Emile crossly in return. "But we thought it would be worthwhile. Glad you could join us, commander."

"Could've done with an invitation."

"Spur of the moment affair. What, did you want a letter with shiny gold trim and fancy ribbon? You know my handwriting's nowhere near good enough for that. Ask soldier-girl; she's female."

"With handwriting as pretty as Halsey is warm and fuzzy," Jennifer retorted. "I've never even been to a wake so I wouldn't even know what I'd be advertising anyway. Seen plenty of people die but I've never been to a wake."

"We drink, we toast, we pass out and wake up in strange beds sans pants," said Emile with a shrug. "Have you seriously never woken up in a strange bed without your pants on, soldier-girl?"

"Soldier-girls don't kiss and tell," she rejoined, "but you're perfectly welcome to share."

"I thought this was a wake, not a sleepover," Jun griped.

"Like I said, no idea what to do," Jennifer reminded him, "so feel free to take the lead."

They all fell quiet after that, eyes trained on the floor they were sitting on. Jennifer rolled a new mason jar between her palms, not yet unscrewing the lid, silent, enjoying the cool glass between her hands. Then she recalled the sound of the glassing over New Alexandria and the coolness was no longer so pleasurable.

"Did I ever tell you guys about the one time I actually sat down and played out a card game with Jorge?" asked Jun abruptly, breaking the silence. "He had a miserable hand, it turned out; well, both of us did, and I was a shitty card player to begin with. Felt like the game would never end, like nobody was ever going to just win already. And then he said something to me. He said something, and then something else that I don't quite remember and then he said, 'You know, we've gotta play with the cards we've been given and we're never gonna know when the game's about to end.' He said that and this was maybe two, three weeks before winter contingency?"

"That's Jorge for you," said Emile with a humorless smile. "He'd turn everything, even a damn card game, into a sentiment."

"I think that was one of the better ones," replied Jun.

Carter didn't say anything, nor did Jennifer. She rolled the mason jar between her palms some more, eyes trained on the lid.

Emile cleared his throat, coughing into his sleeve after a particularly long swig of moonshine. When he had recovered, he shrugged, saying, "Have to say that I've got a hard time thinking of something the big man was afraid of."

"He told me it was a trip we'd all have to make eventually," said Jennifer quietly, her gaze lost in the sheen of the jar's lid, her voice seeming to speak by autopilot. "He told me that before he pushed me off of the supercarrier."

By the time she finally looked back up at the rest of them, the silence had descended once more, so she looked down again. Once more, it was Jun who spoke first: "It's still a trip that nobody plans for."

"Yeah, I don't see much of anyone standing in line to make hotel reservations in the Great Beyond," Emile scoffed. "Ocean or garden view?"

No one laughed. Emile tried again. "If anyone should've been able to see it coming, it should've been Kat. She was always seeing things I didn't."

"Brilliant soldier," said Jun with previously unheard admiration in his voice.

"She was one of the good ones," said Carter quietly, his mason jar half-empty. "Someone you could count on. Didn't let the rules get in her way of doing what she knew had to be done."

"Sometimes her curiosity got the better of her," said Jun evenhandedly, "but it was usually worth it to hear what she found out."

"Never did get to have girl talk with her," commented Jennifer with a ghost of a grin.

"I thought soldier-girls didn't kiss and tell," Emile teased her. She shoved him in retaliation; the jar he held to his lips sloshed over, soaking his chin and collar. "Damn it, Six."

"I don't know how you could be so clumsy, Emile," she replied demurely. "Better go take care of that."

Scowling, the warrant officer climbed lithely to his feet before staggering under the moonshine's influence. Chuckling, Jun rose from the floor also as Emile stumbled down the corridor. "I'll make sure he doesn't get into trouble, commander," said the sniper.

"If they make you take breath tests, it's all on you," Carter warned.

"Dinner's already well over," replied Jun with a chuckle before disappearing down the hallway also.

Jennifer rubbed her neck, suddenly nervous. Carter turned from Jun's retreating back, taking another sip of the moonshine, not looking at her. Abruptly, she said, "I couldn't save it all. There were bits that were beyond help that I had no choice but to cut off. But I tried."

"I see that," he replied noncommittally, still not looking at her.

She tried again. "You didn't want me to cut off my hair."

"You didn't want to cut off your hair. I was just helping you see that."

"It was more than that," she said, half-accusing.

"Do you still hate me, Jennifer?"

She paused, taken aback. "It's… been a long time since we had that conversation," she replied, also noncommittal.

"It still bothers me," he remarked in return. "I've never been told outright by someone who was supposed to be on my side that they hated me."

"It's not exactly standard protocol to tell your commanding officer that."

"To be honest, it felt pretty arbitrary on your part at the time," he admitted. "Was it actually personal?"

"Maybe it was personal," she allowed, "but it probably wasn't deserved."

"It was a nice change of pace actually," Carter remarked with a hollow grin. "Pretty poor timing though, what with a war beginning and all."

"Yeah," she agreed. "Our timing sucked."

He managed another dead smile, taking another drink. She watched. "What do you want?" she suddenly asked him, inspired. "What do you really want, Carter?"

Drawing his sleeve across his mouth, he shrugged. "To get the job done," he answered, "just like what everyone else here wants."

"No," she objected. "That's what Noble Team's commander wants. I didn't ask that. I asked what _you _wanted."

"Is there a difference?" His mouth set in a hard line at the idea.

"Yeah, there's a difference," she said. "So what is it? What do you want? You can tell me; I won't gossip, promise."

He laughed at that and she felt like she had achieved a small victory. "Look, Jen," he said, leaning forward to brace his elbows on his knees, "I don't know what I want then. I know what Noble Leader wants though, and right now that's enough, okay?"

"No, not okay," she replied, almost offended. "What do you want? Everyone wants something; out with it!"

"Drop it."

"No. Say something. Tell me what you want; there's gotta be something…"

"Then I guess I want to know what I want!" he snapped at her. "Okay? I guess I've been Noble Leader for so long that I don't know anymore. So I guess that I want to be able to know. I guess that I want to be able to take off this armor and be human so I can find out what _I _want just so I can make _you _shut up about it!"

She blinked and it was a moment before she found her voice again. "Well," she said evenly, "that's something to want. But you already _are _human, Carter. Both of us are. It's not like we ever stopped."

"No," Carter disagreed. "We're Spartans. That's very clear to me."

"Yeah, and Spartans are human. Look, Carter," she slid across the floor between them, found his eyes, "I didn't get it before. Look, Jorge died. I got that, but that was okay. For all of us, because he chose his death. He could've fallen out of the sky with me and that supercarrier would still be floating up there and he'd probably also still be around. So he didn't really _die_. He saw it coming. Same thing with Thom; they… they chose it. It wasn't an accident; they didn't fuck up. But Kat… Kat was human. Like us. She made a mistake. And I made a mistake; I should've done something out there in that courtyard, but I can't blame myself anymore, not for Jorge or Kat or anyone and you shouldn't blame yourself for them or for Thom. Because we're all human. We all would've died eventually."

"Well, that's comforting," remarked Carter bitterly but not without reason. "Do everything you can to save a planet and then you die. Makes for a great war story."

"Am I trying to write a great war story here? I'm trying to prove to you that we're human and we can't blame ourselves for things that we can't help." She bit down on her lower lip and looked down at her lap. "We're human, and that means we're messy. We do things we don't understand. We get angry for no reason, or for a very good reason. We want. We sometimes want things that we know aren't good for us but we want them anyway. We blame ourselves and each other; we do terrible things. We feel…"

His hand was under her chin, tilting her face upward so that her gaze met his once more. "You make me feel," he told her and then his lips found hers.

He kissed her and this time there was no armor in between them. His hand tangled in what had been salvaged of her hair; she wrapped her arms around his neck. She kissed him almost desperately, hands exploring the geography of shoulders and upper back through his mesh shirt, and before she knew it, they were at the open doorway to the room he had slept alone in ever since the night of the supercarrier.

As the door slid shut behind them, she began to raise half-hearted objections: "What if someone finds out?" was the first as she tugged his shirt overhead.

"What if Emile and Jun come knocking at the door?" was the second. It went much the same way as he undid the clasps at the curve of her back.

"Who gives a damn anymore?" she finally decided before shoving him backwards onto his bunk.


	28. Return to Sender

**A/N**: I'm bad. I'm mean. I should just finish this thing and be done with it. And a couple readers, some guest reviewers but in particular **Mondlichtvogel**, reminded me that I should continue this story even if I've been swept away by the glamour of my _Rebels in the North_. So this one's for you and for everyone else that can vaguely remember this story well enough to know what the hell is going on in this chapter. Cheers!

**Twenty-eight: Return to Sender**

August 29th, 2552

Carter had inky lines carved into the fabric of his back, etched over a canvas of skin pulled taut over muscle and bone. Jennifer had never noticed them before, never had opportunity to see them, or maybe she had and she simply hadn't been looking. Jun wore his tattoos like war paint; Emile had his sinisterly grinning skull splattered across his EVO helmet like his scars put on display for all to see, like some kind of grim art installation piece. They had all been marked, from Kat's robotic arm to Jorge's scars to Jennifer's own loss of identity, and they all bore those stamps like personal armor of their own. Yet she had never seen, never thought that her commander would have a literal pattern of lines and symbols marking his flesh like a second shield spider-webbed out beneath the armor.

In the sleepy half-light of their newly shared berth when she had managed to pull her mesh shirt back over her bare shoulders, she made him roll over onto his stomach, sheets twisted around his waist and legs so that she could have a better look, what was left of her twisted copper hair cascading over one shoulder to create a cameo of her profile as her callused fingers with their stubby nails and picked at cuticles walked a path across his shoulder blades like a compass over a map. Her progress paused at his shoulder, where a rough line carved an inky path, swallowing its tail like a snake to create a jagged shape with three major angles, one pointing to the nape of his neck, one curving around his shoulder, and the third descending lower. "This a country?" she asked, mildly fascinated.

Carter lifted his head from the flattened pillow and the muscles in his back rippled beneath her fingers as he braced his elbows flat against the top of the bed and rested his chin against his folded hands. "State," he answered. "Ohio, actually."

"Ohio," she repeated, trying the word out. "That's on…"

"Earth," he replied, turning his neck so that his eyes found the near wall.

"You didn't say you were from Earth," Jennifer replied. "What's it like back there? I've never been."

"Neither have I," he admitted wryly. "I'm not from Ohio; not personally. But my family is, some generations back. My father liked to remember his roots; I figured I should do the same, and, by doing it, honor him at the same time."

"You've never talked much of your family," she remarked, and then remembered that evening in the common room before the attack on the main Covenant army, that night before the supercarrier dropped out of the sky and onto their already too full plates. That evening where Jorge had whistled a song at her and Carter himself had asked what was wrong with her.

He rolled over slightly and looked up at her. "I remember," he said quietly and in those words she know that he, like she, didn't want to relive that night when they had both relived the tragedy of their pasts. "They're dead," he continued, turning back to brace his elbows against the pillow. "That's what counts now."

"They lived," she corrected, inevitably challenging him as she inevitably always would, and she knew that she wasn't just speaking of their blood families but also of their Spartan counterparts. "Maybe that's what really counts."

"Maybe," Carter allowed with a faint smile; she could see its shadow in the quirk of the corner of his eye. "So I'm not literally from Ohio; I wasn't born there; I didn't grow up there. I've never even seen the place. But my family is from there originally. It's where we started, even if later generations decided to venture off-planet and colonize the stars. And the truth is, I got to thinking, is that we're all from Earth, one way or another. We all started there, all those ages and eons ago. So I wanted to remember the place I'm from, that I'm really from. I figured it would be good to carry around the thing I'm actually fighting for, no matter how far away it seems."

He laughed quietly and rolled his neck around so that he looked instead at the closed door to the rest of the barracks. "Sounds stupid," Carter remarked, "I know."

"Not really," Jennifer said; her voice as muted as his. She looked next at a series of numbers stamped across the back of his ribcage, resting the flat of her knuckles gently against the print. "And these? Looks like latitude and longitude coordinates."

"That," Carter answered dryly, "would be because they are latitude and longitude coordinates." He rolled over, reaching out with one hand to shove her off of his back so that she fell sideways to the bed beside him. Face to face, he told her somewhat less sardonically, "I didn't completely forget where I _actually_ grew up"

She smirked and shrugged back at him, a quick movement of her shoulders that made the sheets and mattress rustle with her returned irony. "What are you going to miss the most," she asked as though inspired to peel a scab from a barely closed wound and prod at its crimson-bleeding interior, "about where you're from? I'm curious."

"I don't know," he fenced the question. "What about you?"

"I asked."

"You asked," he allowed, "but I'll bet it was because there was something you really wanted to talk about re the place where you're from. So what is it, Jennifer? What are you fighting to get back to, that you want the smallest chance of being able to get back to?"

Rolling her eyes at him, she flopped onto her back beside him and stared up at the low ceiling above them. Idly and yet with intent, she remarked, "There was a time when I would have said that I don't know what I'm fighting for, if it's to get back anything; I mean, do I look like I ever had anything? And then there was a time when I would have told you that anyway, whether I believed it or not, because I would have just wanted to annoy you. But I don't think you'd believe me if I said so now. D'you think so?"

She arched her neck and turned her head to look at him for his answer. He shook his head, and she settled back against the pillow and resumed gazing at the ceiling. "No," she said quietly, "I don't think so either." She drummed her fingers against the wall, thinking, considering.

Carter waited for her patiently, until she stopped the tapping of her nails against the metal wall and said abruptly, "It's the ocean. There was an ocean by the place I'm from, like the ones here on Reach; I mean, yeah, I know that every planet kind of has to have an ocean for us to have any chance of living on it. But my ocean… it was just so big. Coming up the road to it, it was like you were all narrow-minded, just looking one way, thinking in one direction and such a small, limited one at that, and then the canyon broke open to the cliffs and… there it was. It was like you were looking for this small thing all this time and then instead you find this big, huge, massive thing instead." She paused and looked over at him again. "Do you at least kind of get it?"

"Yeah," he answered and it was enough. "I get it." He paused and she wondered what she was supposed to do, now that they had woken up together and she had clearly forgotten to creep back to her own berth as she had too many times during training. She didn't like the waking up, the forced sober intimacy. She should have run away hours ago, yet here she was and she found that her pride wouldn't stand for a hasty withdrawal in the broad lamplight, when he was awake to watch her scuttle her retreat.

"You don't have any," he pointed out and she thought he was getting off-topic.

"Nope," Jennifer confirmed shortly. "After augmentation, everyone was getting up and running to get inked –I mean, they would have been if they could get up and run after that damned surgery and they couldn't just barely manage lying there and moaning on the tables –but I didn't feel like it. I said no. And once I said no once…" She shrugged and he could take her meaning or leave it. "What, d'you think I should get one? Waves across my collarbones? A lighthouse on my shoulder blade? It wouldn't suit me."

"Not," he replied, "if it was done right."

There was a rapping against the door as warning, but it was not warning enough. Jennifer made as if to throw herself left and off of the bed so that the mattress and trailing sheets would conceal her, another throwback to more promiscuous days, but she hit the wall and no escape instead.

Carter sat up too quickly; banging his head on the upper bunk's low-lying ceiling and swearing loudly as the door slid open and Emile stepped into the room. "They're prepping the Falcons," the soldier, lanky for a Spartan, drawled. "Flight check's in twenty minutes. They're wondering where you are and we can't find soldier-girl—"

The game was up," Jennifer decided, and she also decided that she wanted to end it on her terms. Emile's voice halted abruptly when she poked her head over Carter's broad shoulder and glared at him. Her comrade's mouth dropped open half-an-inch at the sight of her in their commander's bed and a dark flush quickly spread across his angular cheekbones. "Well, _shit_," he managed and then spun around on his heel and stepped back into the hallway, shouting as the door slid shut behind him, "Jun, I found her!"

Caught in mutual shock and embarrassment, neither Jennifer nor Carter said anything for a good minute. Finally, Jennifer slid off of the bed and found her pants. "Well," she said, her voice loud and awkward in the compartment-like room, "all things considering, that _could _have gone worse."

Carter blinked as though shaken out of a trance. "Yeah," he agreed, "could have."

"Besides," she said carelessly as she zipped her trousers up around her waist and found her bra amidst the tangle of discarded clothing on the ground, "people preoccupied with the end of life as we know it aren't going to be thinking too hard about who's shagging who."

Jennifer was fastening the band around her chest beneath her mesh shirt when he caught her shoulder and spun her around to face him. "Don't talk like that."

"What?" She raised an eyebrow at him. "We did _shag_ last night; or at least I assume that's what happened since I woke up without any pants. Care to correct me?"

His face was already ruddy from Emile's interruption; his skin darkened to a shade deeper with her casual words and cavalier attitude. "Not that," he said stubbornly. "I meant the 'end of the world' crap. There's already enough of that going around, don't you think?"

She gathered up the rest of her things, shoes and socks and the like, and shot him a sideways smirk. "I didn't say that _I_ believed it or that _you _should," she shot back. "I just said that _they _all were thinking about it. And I meant that we're all a bit preoccupied with making sure it doesn't happen. Moot point, I know."

"Moot point," he agreed, watching her oddly. He inclined his head as though in farewell. "See you down in the hangar."

"See you there," she replied and then went out into the hallway to find her room again and suit up. She had a feeling that it was going to be a long day.

…

Fire had rained down on the hills surrounding what had once been ONI Sword Base. Slash and burn had become charred and scarred; trees seared, rocks branded. "_World's on_ _fire,_ Jennifer thought to herself as her shields, recently diminished from hitting the ground hard from the circling Falcon, hummed their return. _And it's more than I can handle._ The fall from the supercarrier, the desert outside New Alexandria, the desperate rescue operations within the city itself, she had been on her own and it had nearly killed her. Fortunately, this time she once again had Noble Team at her back. Or all that remained of it, anyway.

And a few auxiliary soldiers besides, she noted, glancing down the cliff side. Her helmet felt strangely heavy on her head; there was a price to be paid for the previous night's adventure, she assumed dryly. Not to mention the booze.

Holland's voice was buzzing in her ear. Of all of the people who could have survived… Jennifer instantly checked that line of thought. One must be grateful. "_Noble One, this is Noble Actual. Noble One, can you confirm?_"

"_Confirmed,_" she heard Carter reply and regarded his apparent lag with amusement. Perhaps her brain was not the only one playing catch-up this morning. "_Go ahead._"

"_Copy that, Noble One. Your people on the ground? We need that base taken out, son._"

"_Three is still in the air with me. Four and Six on the floor. Emile, what's your status?_"

"_On the overlook at Airview, Falcon about to take off again,_" the petty officer replied, nothing smarmy or swaggering in his tone now. "_This place looks re-e-e-e-al popular, commander. It's standing room only at this show._"

"_Thermal sensors agree,_" Carter replied wryly and Jennifer, dropping to the ground and peering through the scope of her sniper rifle, had to agree as well if the Covenant troops at the AA gun in front of her were any indication. "_You hear that, Actual? We've got to thin them or they'll just pile on top of us before we know it._"

"_Copy that, Noble One,_" Holland replied. _"I take it you've got Six on that mission?_"

"_Good guess, Actual,_" Carter said while the Spartan in question dropped down the rocks, scattering dust in her wake. "_I know she can do it,_" he continued and she felt an odd feeling rise in her chest. "_I've seen her do it before._"

"_I can believe it. Holland out._"

"I'll believe it when I actually do it," Jennifer muttered to no one in particular, her active comm link firmly deactivated so that her words wouldn't be conveyed to the rest of the team and whoever else happened to be listening in.

Three ODST troopers turned at her arrival, rifles at the ready. When they –two men, one woman –realized it was a Spartan and their apparent salvation rather than an Elite and their doom, they nodded a greeting. The woman saluted. "Sergeant Ellis, reporting in," she said. "My men and I will follow you down to Farragut Station on your order."

Jennifer clicked her comm to life. "Commander? I've just made the rendezvous with the troopers. We're really headed to Farragut?"

She remembered the place well enough from the first time Noble Team had fought on this ground, when she and Kat had repaired a communications array during Sword Base's initial defense earlier that summer. She had hijacked a Wraith and acted as though it was nothing; Kat called the machine messy when a couple grunts and a jackal had found themselves crushed and ground up beneath its repulsors.

If they only could be so lucky now.

"_Covenant own it now,_" Carter answered, sounding more resigned at this point than anything else, Jennifer thought. But weren't they all? "_Good news is that they're prepped to defend for a full-scale strike, not an infiltration. We've got to eliminate the AA support so that the rest of Noble can land at the base for the torch and burn. Keep a low profile and take them surprised; between your strike and Emile's to the west of Airview, they should stay scattered. You'll meet in the middle. Keep me posted._"

Farragut Station was underwater. Like a dead man drowning in a pool of his own blood, the rooftops that Jennifer vaguely remembered clambering onto while Kat manned the Wraith seemed to float upon the run off from the melted ice shelf. _It's the end of summer, not the beginning,_ Jennifer thought to herself as she signaled for Sergeant Ellis and her men to hold position as the Spartan lifted her sniper rifle against her visor and looked ahead. _The planet is supposed to be freezing, not thawing._

"There's a Falcon down," Ellis said, her own scope lifted and zoomed. "Watch for bodies."

_To do what with? _she wanted to snap but she merely shrugged and let her rifle drop to be level with her chest. "They've erected defenses there," she pointed, "and there," she pointed again. "There's a sniper on the roof and a Revenant in front. Wait for my shot and then charge around the back."

"Understood." Ellis saluted smartly and then turned to her men. "Let's move." They did so, skirting around the ledge to where Jennifer had indicated, leaving the Spartan to pick her priorities and fast.

She had one shot and one shot only before the element of surprise was lost. She didn't know how good a sniper that jackal was; he might be able to pick at best one of them off under pressure, or he might be able to fire off three shots without blinking and she'd have lost three troopers in one go. If she was going to try for him, though, she'd have to do it now before the tiny target started darting about as jackals were likely to do.

It had been a jackal she saw on that rooftop at Visegrad, the first contact on Reach's surface that had started it all. How long ago and far away it all seemed…

The Revenant was fast too, Jennifer decided, and could wipe out all of them with one charge of its repulsors, but it was also quite a bit bigger and a large target, even moving fast, was an easier one. So she made her decision, raised her rifle's barrel, aimed high, and fired.

The pilot turned his craft not in the direction of the sound of the shot, as Jennifer had predicted, as she had hoped, but instead, tragically, in the direction of the splash as the sniper's body tumbled into the water: the direction from which the ODST troopers charged forward. Cursing, Jennifer shouldered her sniper rifle and instead pulled out her DMR as she ran forward, sliding down the gravelly slope. She was going to have to be fast; she was going to have to be superhumanly fast.

The ODST troopers were picking off grunts and whittling down Shade turrets; rather competently, Jennifer admitted to herself with begrudging admiration. But even at a distance, there was no mistaking the dread that washed over Ellis's face when she turned and saw the Covenant craft revving up its engines and its pilot's leering face fixed on her and her men. "Split!" the sergeant shouted out a drill and the three troopers dove out of the Revenant's path, two left and one right, and the Covenant craft stalled its engine for the split second Jennifer needed.

She dropped her DMR, pulled her knife, and launched herself upward in two lunges, landing on the port side of Revenant's hull with one foot placed in front of the other. For a brief moment, she regained her balance and then bent her knees, bracing herself like a swimmer when the wave crashed overhead. The enemy pilot's head swiveled left and up, wide-set alien eyes filled with a shocked surprise that transcended language and culture, the hand on the joystick jerking left and right in an effort to shake the unwanted passenger.

That failing, the jackal dropped the controls and fumbled for a sidearm, but Jennifer had already stepped up and around so that she stood straddling the pilot's seat as the craft spun in a wild arc, the repulsors engine without steady direction. She grabbed a handful of the bristly white hair protruding straight out of the alien's scalp in her left hand and yanked upward as the knife in her right hand slit the pilot's throat open from ear to ear.

As its pilot's lifeblood gurgled forward and splattered against the controls, the Revenant arced into a tailspin as its repulsors abruptly faded, lost potential energy and undirected momentum sending the craft spiraling toward the underwater station, and Jennifer jumped. She hit the ground hard, but her shields took the impact and she was soon back on her feet and hunting for her discarded DMR as Emile's unsolicited opinions buzzed in her ears:

"_Kat was right,_" he was commenting –rather calmly, Jennifer thought irritably as she dusted off her gun, for someone who was supposedly doing the same work she was."_It does seem like overkill. Sending us back here for some demo op._"

"_ONI thinks it's worth it,_" Jun answered from somewhere in the air as Jennifer regrouped with Sergeant Ellis and her troops, all a little bruised and battered but still breathing. Noble Three paused and she imagined him lining up a shot between thoughts. "_Does that tell you something?_"

_Of course it does_, Jennifer thought, half-irritated, half-exasperated. _It says that somebody's trying to pull the wool over our eyes, as it is whenever ONI is involved, as it was back at Visegrad. As it was when we were here last time._ She expected Emile to say something to that effect himself and listened for the snarky reply as she pointed to an abandoned Scorpion into which Sergeant Ellis and her men loaded their weapons and themselves.

But instead Emile was oddly taciturn as Jennifer took the wheel and started the engine, rolling over dust, rubble, and corpses toward the AA guns. "_It tells me things ain't so simple,_" he finally replied and Jennifer, thinking not only of the secrecy surrounding this mission but also of the events of last night, the very thing they had been warned off of since the first day of recruits' orientation, couldn't agree more.


	29. Rabbit Hole Redux

**Twenty-Nine: Rabbit Hole Redux**

August 29th, 2552

Jennifer caught up with Emilie about a quarter klick from ONI Sword Base proper and just barely stalled the more successfully purloined Revenant's engine long enough for her team member to leap aboard. Before the petty officer had settled himself into the turret, they were off again, coasting smooth and fast toward the courtyard, wind roaring in their ears and exhaust trailing in their wake.

"I don't like all of this secrecy," Emile said above the engine's hum, for her ears only. "If they wanted a torch and burn, they could've dropped a MAC round from the atmosphere. They've done it before and we were a hell of a lot closer to the impact. Just blow the whole thing off the damn map and don't look back."

_Don't look back._ Impossible, Jennifer decided, especially here, where the landscape itself seemed to insist on retrospection. That was the bluff where she had insisted on hijacking the Wraith and Kat had called off the artillery to give her the chance. That up ahead was the gate where they had been ambushed. Inside was the—

_Stop it,_ said a voice in the back of her head that sounded suspiciously like the old Six, resurrected from whatever grave she had retired to. _Next it will be, 'Oh, this tile. This tile was the tile Jorge and Kat both stepped on after Halsey yelled at us and Carter finally yelled back. Oh, cry the beloved tile.'_

"I swear," Emile continued, shaking Jennifer out of her reverie just in time to guide the Revenant through Sword Base's gate. "It's all so suspicious that it's making my nose twitch."

Her mouth twitched with a smirk of its own as she spared a glance down toward the warrant officer in the turret. "Don't worry about it," she said. "It's not like anybody's looking."

"Or would be able to tell if they were," he replied with some satisfaction and Jennifer noted the occasion as one of the very few times she had seen Emile take pride in his skull-faced helmet.

"_Four, Six, what's your ETA?_"

"Less than a minute," Emile answered Carter presumably so that his teammate could keep her eyes on the road. "What, are we late to the Covvies' garden party? Hate to admit it but I'm not loving what they've done with the place."

"_You and me both," _was Carter's wry reply, no doubt wondering how Emile could keep cracking quips at a time like this when all could be lost in the blink of an eye. _"Falcon group has landed; hostiles have been engaged. Jun is working on getting the gate open."_

"_Really missing Kat about now…" _the sniper himself muttered into his comm and something twisted in Jennifer's gut. For some odd, dizzy reason, she remembered her mother's reaction when word came that the Covenant had taken the other holdout on Harmony: the peals of laughter at the revelation that their little city, too small to be rightfully called such, was next and that the evac wouldn't get there fast enough. _'If I don't laugh,' _she had said, clutching her mouth and chin in the palm of her hand as if afraid they would otherwise fall off. _'If I don't laugh, I'll cry.'_

"Coming up on the gate fast, soldier-girl," Emile said quickly and Jennifer felt her grip jar on the controls.

"That's because I'm going too fast," she admitted and checked herself. Into the comm, she said, "Noble Team, the Revenant is friendly. Repeat, it is friendly. So be… friendly."

Emile snickered. Carter, less easy to amuse as always, replied, _"Understood, Six," _just as Jun announced, _"Got it. Gate is open, boss."_

"Turret ten o'clock!" Emile announced and turned his own mounted gun against the enemy.

Jennifer briefly stalled the engine to give him a better shot, but Carter objected. _"Turret's not going to follow us into the base. Get over here, both of you. The Covenant is all over this place as it is. Ditch the Covvies' ride, fry it, and get inside."_

"No shiny toys for us," Emile muttered but he climbed out of his gunnery turret without issue once they were just outside the courtyard proper. With no small amount of regret, Jennifer did the same and, as Emile sprinted down under the wall to join Carter and Jun, pumped one of the craft's lateral engines full of bullets until it was a smoking wreck of plasma and metal. That being done, she ducked under the wall and jogged through the ajar gate, the sound of a firefight preluding her entrance.

Reloading her DMR in preparation, she found her ammo wanting. She wouldn't be much help with seven bullets; Jennifer decided grimly and slipped off the beaten path of Covenant corpses as Emile's announcement rang in her ears: _"Tangos coming from the pad!"_

"_And the garage," _Jun added as she took a running start and slid through the gap between a truck's wheels, scratching up her armor. There would have been a time when she cared, but not today. She met a jackal on the other side pawing at the equipment of a fallen trooper. It barely had time to squawk its surprise before she shot it between the eyes. _Six bullets._

Carter's voice shouted a command in her ears as she took the jackal's place, scavenging suitable ammo from the ODST trooper's body and stuffing the clips into her armor's compartments: _"Six, where the hell are you?"_

"On my way, commander," she answered and then made good on that statement, skirting around the trucks at a jog and reloading her weapon as she moved. There were a few more jackals doing the same with their own needle rifles; she shot one and then charged the other, knocking its sinewy body to one side and turning at the last moment to put a bullet in its knobby, feathered head. _They really are so different from us, _she thought as she made up the distance between her and the rest of her team, _no matter what Jorge or Jun said or says. They're nothing like what we imagined in the old sci-fi vids from Earth and, more than that, they deemed us unworthy to join their little intergalactic club. But it's nothing like the old vids. In the old vids, the good guys win._

She saw Carter exchange fire with two jackals that leapt lithely from side to side, rolling and bounding between dual cover points of a truck and a small mountain of rubble from a collapsed garage. Noble's commander had exchanged his own DMR for an assault rifle to suit the occasion and was providing covering fire as Emile and then Jun ducked into the parking lot. _"Jennifer," _he said above the constant pop of bullets, _"I swear, if you don't get your ass over here—"_

The leftmost jackal darted out of cover for a split second and she knew her commander was understandably too preoccupied with gunning down its partner to take advantage of the opportunity. She shouldered her DMR, stood her ground, and fired off a series of quick, precise shots. When both jackals had crumpled to the ground due to their combined efforts, Carter spun around, assault rifle lifted and ready, but lowered it when he saw the familiar crimson armor of his surviving lieutenant.

"You sure know how to make an entrance," he started to say but then lifted his rifle once more and, understanding, Jennifer darted forward into a quick roll that landed her crouching and turned to face the enemy.

There was no need. The elite hit the ground hard, its shields, armor, and exoskeleton, all already weakened, pumped full of rounds. She got to her feet and backed cautiously into the parking lot as Carter covered her, saying, "Jun, it's about time to lock down that gate."

"Remote command is primed and ready," the sniper answered as Jennifer joined him in the base's interior. Lifting her rifle's scope to her visor, Jennifer scanned the space beyond the gate and found it swarmed with reinforcements.

"On my mark," Carter was saying, but she already knew that his mark would be too late. "Do it now," Jennifer said quickly and when Emile added his voice to hers, she knew that he saw through his scope what she did.

"Now, then," their commander agreed and Jun hit the command, shutting down both the gate and the parking garage entrance.

"There," the sniper said with satisfaction, "that should buy us all the time we need."

"So long as they don't wise up and start the AA guns back up again," Emile retorted. "Then there's no way airlifting us out of here is gonna fly." He paused briefly. "Get it?"

Jun for one seemed more preoccupied with the elevator's controls on the far side of the parking lot. Jennifer, on the other hand, looked not at the elevator itself but at the scorch marks scarring its doors and the space around it, remembering how Kat, in a bid to secure some cover from the hunters that had once roamed this very garage, had tossed grenades like party favors into the corridor to take out the elite guardian. The memory was vivid enough that Jennifer had to check herself to make sure that no hunters were creeping up behind her this time. Instead, she looked over her shoulder into the shattered glass windshield of a devastated warthog and saw that the only thing creeping up on her was Noble Six.

"What is everyone's damage?" Emile griped. "It's only the end of the world as we know it."

"The only damage you should be concerned with," Jun said curtly, stepping back from the elevator's controls, "is the fact that the elevator's electrical is fried six ways from Sunday. There's no going up the quick n' easy way this time around."

Carter clicked the safety on his DMR and bashed the grip against the padlock on a door at the far end of the parking structure. Kicking the door open, he entered with his rifle locked and loaded, making sure the way was clear. "Then we go through maintenance," he decided, his voice strange and echoed as Jennifer followed him into the maintenance hall and looked upward at the series of metal catwalks above. "One way or another, we'll get where we need to go. Emile, take point."

Jennifer, already moving to do just that, stopped in her tracks and scowled as Emile moved past her and up a metal staircase that clanged with each of the warrant officer's steps, well aware of the fact that she had a lighter step, was better placed, and would have been the better choice. And she had been the first choice, before. So what had changed?

Moving ahead and scoping the next level of catwalks with his DMR at the ready, Emile declared that the way was, "Clear," and then added his own personal brand of commentary as he was inevitably bound to do. "Careful. With all these sparking wires, we'll be damned lucky if anything works."

"I think we're due for some luck," Jun remarked and Jennifer, refusing to be left behind, outstripped Carter's pace and joined Emile. But where he had looked forward, she looked up.

"Movement ahead," she said, looking up at the catwalks above. "I think we boxed some hostiles in here with us."

"No avoiding it," Carter responded grimly. "Engage, but be smart about it. Nobody wants to take a fall around here."

"No cover," Jun observed.

"No problem," Emile rejoined. "I just reload."

Deciding to take the opportunity to do just that, Jennifer dropped an empty cartridge to the catwalk below and followed Emile up the ramp. The warrant officer charged forward onto a bend in the scaffolding… and then immediately jerked backward, knocking into her as a series of needles embedded themselves into the railing and the far wall beyond. "What happened to 'I just reload'?" she asked him irritably.

"You want to charge full throttle into four jackals all lined up, be my guest," Emile retorted before darting back out to risk a few shots. Ducking back out of the line of fire beside her, he added, "Maybe offer to paint their nails while you're at it, soldier-girl."

"Maybe," she retorted, throwing herself out there to attempt the same, trying to line up shots at a infuriatingly fast pace, before crouching back into cover, "you should trade ideas on armor ornamentation."

"Armor ornamentation?" repeated Emile incredulously, taking his turn. "That's just lame. And way too many syllables. Hey, where'd the Covvies go?"

He stood dead center on the bend in the catwalks, a position that would have gotten him impaled by needles a moment before - _Kat's armored body hit the ground, a star-shaped hole, a splintering sunburst of fractured glass where here once immaculately polished visor used to be_ –Jennifer shook her head. Not that. Not now. Not now when they had all been doing so well forgetting.

"_Are you two quite done?"_ asked Jun through the comm, but he sounded more amused than anything else. _"I've got to hand it to you both: you make great distractions."_

Emile swore loudly. "Jun, you bastard kill-stealer, where are you?"

Jennifer, knowing a sniper's habits, looked up, scanned the above catwalks, and found the vantage point from which Carter and Jun had been able to pick off the unsuspecting jackals at their leisure. By reverse reasoning, she traced a path downward from one platform to another and found the rickety metal ladder they had used to their advantage. Impressed despite herself, she shot the two of them a mock-salute, which Jun returned. Emile flipped them off, and that seemed to be the thing that sent their commander over the edge.

There was a loud clang as Carter dropped down from the higher point and hit the catwalk in front of the two of them, the shock of landing absorbed into his shields. "Alright, that's enough," he told Emile flatly, but spared a glance in Jennifer's direction too. "This isn't a game. We've got a job to do and there's too much to lose if we fail. So let's get to it. No more smart comments. I mean it this time."

'_If I don't laugh, I'll cry,' _her mother had said and now the words were on her daughter's tongue. But Jennifer swallowed them hard and tasted their bitterness before granting her commander a nod and marching past him up the platforms. For what felt like the first time since her arrival and induction into Noble Team, Emile gave Carter more trouble than she did, standing his ground, skull glaring by default, but that too passed and Noble Four followed Six up the ramp, one paper-cut Spartan after another.

"_Welcome t-t-t-t-to the of-of-of-of-of-ice of Naval Intelligence,"_ stuttered the cool female voiced VI as they entered the security checkpoint from the maintenance hatch at the catwalks' summit, and Jennifer felt the chill of déjà vu gone wrong. _"P-p-p-please wait as an On-n-n-n-NI represent-t-ta-ta-tive will meet-t-t—" _

Emile, still sullen and sour with it, fired a round into the speaker, putting the warped program out of its misery. "That's not gonna happen," he muttered and then glanced in Carter's direction as if daring his commander to put him in his place again.

"Where we going now, boss?" Jun asked, checking around corners and behind furniture and playing a subtle hand of peacekeeper while he was at it.

"Dot?" Carter sighed and yielded the field to their AI.

"_Please proceed to the prearranged coordinates,"_ was the crisp reply and then they all had a turn to sigh, Jennifer included as she glanced to the radar on her visor's interior display and saw the coordinates light up like a flare some distance away and above as no doubt the rest of her team did.

"That's not cryptic at all."

"_You know as much as I do, Noble Four,"_ Dot replied and, intend or not, the wry humor made Jennifer chuckle slightly.

"Atrium through here," Jun announced as he banged his fist against a pad and activated the door, stepping through the doorway and securing the corridor, "and coordinates just beyond."

"Let's pick up the pace then," Carter replied and then Jennifer knew that he saw the same ghosts she did. "Jun, take point. We'll follow."

_Not funny,_ Jennifer thought darkly, having been passed over once again but she told herself that this was hardly the time to be calling her commander out. Matter for another time, in another place…

If they didn't run out of times and places before then.

…

The coordinates led them to a corridor piled high with sandbags, broken turret machinery, and bodies. With strange respect, Emile was careful to step over and around the corpses as he took the lead down the passage, his armor splattered with the blood of the elites that had darted through the atrium. The hallway was as silent as a tomb, but that didn't stop Jennifer from leaning down to collect dogtags for a future, more fitting remembrance. She tried not to look at the mangled faces and bodies connected the necks she pulled the chains free from.

Bringing up the rear now, Jun remarked, "Looks like they got themselves cornered here."

"Or were committed to this position," Carter offered in return, moving forward into the corridor as well, trying to discern why these troopers had made their last stand here… and, more critically, why Dot had led them to this place.

Ahead, Emile darted forward fast into the continuing corridor, rifle lifted preemptively and then lowered. "I'm going with cornered," he said. "There's nothing here."

_There's something here,_ Jennifer thought but she didn't yet feel confident enough in that opinion to voice it aloud. All she knew was that "If ONI sent us here, to this spot; they did it for a reason."

"They have their reasons, ONI," Jun agreed, "but take a good look at this place, you know, past all the dead people. I don't see any load-bearing columns. Sir," he looked to Carter, "if we're supposed to blow this place to bits, this is the last place to do it from."

_This is the place for something, _Jennifer thought, but she didn't know what yet. Carter, looking for more concrete reasons for this apparent mistake, referred to Dot again. "Dot, check your vector."

"_Vector confirmed, commander,"_ the AI replied, slightly reproving if one had imagination. _"We are precisely where ONI has directed us."_

Jennifer, half-listening, paced forward to the apparent end of the corridor, trying to remember when they had last been here, what had happened that day. They had taken Sword Base back, they had fought up the height of the atrium, they had blown up the Covenant's aerial support, she had lost her knife, and they had met with—

"Is Dr. Halsey dead?" she asked abruptly.

"MIA," Jun replied quietly. "No confirmation either way but presumed—"

"_Apologies," _Dot, well, apologized and Emile, Jun, and Jennifer all looked at Carter in surprise. He lifted a hand and shrugged as though to wordlessly tell them that he had no clue what was going on either. _"Coordinates revised. Please confirm, Noble Leader."_

"Revised…?" Carter, Emile, and Jun all repeated, their disbelief near-synchronized. Only Jennifer felt mild surprise and smiled because of it.

"_By an AI of unknown origin,"_ was the prim response, _"whose clearance is well above my own."_

The revised coordinates lit up Jennifer's radar. She followed their flare and realized—

"Well," Jun observed with sardonic cheerfulness, "this new AI is pointing us, oh, a klick and a half east and… Oh. Two thousand feet underground."

"I don't know about this, commander," Emile added, seizing the opportunity. "I didn't bring my shovel."

"Sir," Jun said before Carter had a chance to respond. "AI free, this one time. Obviously, these coordinates are junk data and we should just find our own place to blow up this damn thing, because it's just going to get worse the longer we go chasing them down the—"

Emile jumped back from the rear of the corridor and Jennifer lifted her DMR as the sound of metal gears grinding against each other drowned the hallway. Barely missing a beat, the rest of Noble Team joined her, all of their guns directed at the slowly ascending wall that had appeared oh-so solid just moments before. The passageway lurched open and the grinding noise ended as abruptly as it began. Already closest, Emile peered into the darkness beyond. Jennifer activated her helmet's night vision just in time for a series of emergency lights to flicker awake, illuminating the passage.

"Rabbit hole," Jun finished his interrupted sentence, clearly taken aback by the sentiment's suitability to the occasion.

"Dot," said Carter as though doubting whether the AI was still with them. "What is this?"

"_Our revised route, commander."_

"Actual didn't say anything about secret passages," Jun objected. "He said, 'Torch and burn,' not 'Take a page out of Alice in Wonderland' with a strange new AI for the white rabbit."

"McGuffin much?" Emile muttered darkly.

"Maybe Holland didn't know," Jennifer said quietly. "Maybe ONI was worried communications were compromised and couldn't tell him the whole story."

"Somehow, that doesn't make me feel better."

"We've come this far, Jun," Carter decided. "Might as well see it through to the end. Your new AI friend say anything else, Dot?"

Emile looked to Jennifer and jerked his head in the direction of the tunnel. She shrugged her indifference and he went ahead and took point. One after another, they followed the blinking emergency lights down the hidden corridor. There were no bodies, she noticed but kept her weapon at the ready all the same. In fact, the hallway looked polished, clean, a relic of another time that felt so long ago.

"Dot?" she heard Carter, somewhere behind her, say again and this time their AI responded.

"_She says she's been expecting you."_

"That's _perfect_," Emile muttered and Jennifer had to agree.

"Your nose twitching again?" she asked him with quite amusement as the tunnel began to open up in front of them.

"Like I'm the damn rabbit in Jun's metaphor," he agreed and she snorted her laughter. But then the tunnel expanded even more, exponentially in fact, and they all caught their breath and stared.

"That's not something you see every day," remarked Jennifer to the tram parked in the hollow of the cavern, lights on, doors open, waiting for them.

"Commander, I'm thinking that it's safe to assume that this cave is not in fact a natural formation," Jun announced.

"Don't need a shovel at least," Emile muttered in response. "Think this is a Covenant set-up?"

"If this the Covvies' work," Jennifer said with a shrug, "it's a pretty elaborately baited trap. Question is, do we take the bait?"

"Dot?" Carter checked.

"_You and your time were led here, commander, for a reason, I am told."_

Jennifer and Jun exchanged a glance even through the barrier of their visors. Carter sighed and looked to the tram. "We've come this far," he said again by way of decision. "I'll be damned with we leave here with anything less than an explanation for this wild goose chase. Let's go."

As they filed into the mirage-like tram, a vision she was expecting to dissipate like smoke in the air at any moment, she found herself considering Jorge: something she hadn't done in a long time, it felt like, with the second tragedy of Kat and other complications that had drawn them all underwater where a ghost wouldn't be able to save them from drowning. As none of Noble Team took a seat amongst places clearly not designed for Spartans, she thought of how they all had stood at attention when Halsey had berated them during their first mission at Sword Base… until Carter had berated her back. How Jorge had lingered, waiting for acknowledgement from his surrogate mother of sorts and had had to ask it of her at the end, but hadn't seemed to mind. Strange things. What was it he had said when he was floating outside the Sabre cockpit and Sword Base was under siege below them?

"_Ez megszakad a szivem,_" she murmured, earning her a couple of odd looks from her teammates as the tram lurched to life. She remembered Dot reminding him of the math, of the inevitability of Sword Base's fate and that there was nothing he could do. _I know,_ Jorge had replied and, in real time, Jennifer found herself humming, _Planet Earth is blue and there's nothing I can do_. It seemed that fatalism was the trending emotion around here.


	30. Lone Wolf Relapse

**Thirty: Lone Wolf Relapse **

August 29th, 2552

Static breathed into the tram's monitor screens. The Spartan soldier branded Noble Six, named and known as Jennifer, was not the only one set on edge by the sudden crackle of life; Carter, Jun, and Emile all turned in surprise and suspicion. Their weapons, she noticed had, not left their hands ever since that last showdown on the catwalks with the Covenant forces trapped in Sword Base with them. _Let it go,_ she wanted to tell them. _What can't touch you can't hurt you._ But she said no such thing once she glanced down and saw that her own gloved fingers were coiled around the hilt of her familiar knife.

Strange. She was supposed to have the perfect body. She was supposed to be able to control it without any glitches, know what she was doing and how to do it and be able to do it constantly, consistently. Spartan strength on command; or was it on demand? Jennifer couldn't tell the difference between the two, lately. But that was hardly out of character lately, was it?

_Let. Go_. She released the command from the corridors of her brain, felt it course down the length of her left arm's skeleton like a chemical –_feeling is just a chemical_, someone had told her once, _until we give it purpose _–and then exhaled softly as her grip loosened and her fingers came undone as a familiar, worn face appeared on the monitor, just barely visible through the storm of static.

"_Apologies for the unusual security measures, Commander, Noble Team,"_ said Dr. Catherine Halsey, sounding anything but sorry through the white noise, _"but I believe you'll agree that the stakes demand it."_

"MIA is right," Jun whistled quietly beneath his breath as Carter said, more formally, "Dr. Halsey. Casualty reports have you filed as…"

"_I believe the word you are looking for is 'dead,'"_ she replied somewhat smugly, Jennifer thought. _"The report was, as they say, greatly exaggerated but it served its purpose. It's given me a bit of a longer leash when it comes to my private operations."_ She fell silent and the weight of the resulting albeit brief quiet was heavier than any words she could have spoken. Still: _"I wish the same could be said of the rest of Noble Team."_

Once again, there were no spoken words that could communicate the way Jun's visor turned ever so slightly to one side, the way Emile flicked the safety on his magnum back and forth, back and forth, the way Jennifer wished she could step toward Carter and… do nothing. She didn't want to take his hand, or touch his shoulder; no, that was neither of their styles. She just wanted him to know that she was _there_, like he had wanted her to be: not somewhere else, not playing the part of Noble Six, not caught in the mental trap that probably was PTSD –he had probably been right all along; that's probably what it was and she was only now humbled enough to admit it, even to herself –that she was with him and with the team and she wasn't going to run away to play the lone wolf. Not this time.

But she wasn't sure he got it when she heard the burden in his voice as he replied, "We all do, ma'am."

For a brief, fleeting moment, Jennifer thought Halsey cared. It was difficult to tell between the skipping feed and the white noise, but she thought she saw the flash of remorse and resignation cross the doctor's face. The syntax of her words –her apparent 'regret' –had carried the same emotion. Reach was dying; had the miniature apocalypse, delimited step by step by the Covenant's apparent thirst for domination, sparked sentimentality in the 'mother' of all modern Spartans?

_No_, Jennifer quickly realized with no small amount of her own remorse and resignation, Dr. Halsey's 'sentimental' moment served a far more pragmatic purpose: a segue into her true design. _It always does_.

"_Well,"_ said the doctor, pursing her lips for the briefest of moments, _"it may give you some comfort to know that they played their parts before the end. Noble Two in particular was very impressive. The data module she procured from Visegrad—"_

_The data module she all but decrypted for you from Visegrad._

"—_contained precisely what my colleague—"_

_Your dead colleague with the traumatized daughter whose name you didn't care to know. What happened to her, to Sara?_

"—_promised: the secrets of this excavation,"_ Halsey continued and Jennifer moved her head from side to side as if to clear it. _"A latchkey discovery. A possible –our possible –ace in the hole."_

"Not sure where you're going with this," replied Carter, stubbornly obtuse, and Jennifer felt her eyes close in exasperation without her express consent. She knew where they were going with this. She had known since that first time they had walked into Sword Base. They were going where they were always going. ONI wanted something done and they wanted them to go and do it for them. Command or demand; it didn't matter.

"We had our orders," Noble Team's commander continued, "and they sure as hell weren't to get onto a train and listen to an ONI specialist who is supposed to be dead tell me—"

"_And tell you what?"_ Halsey snapped in return. _"Tell you what your lieutenant commander accomplished, even beyond the grave? If we all could be so lucky."_ Jennifer ground her teeth; Jun shook his head at her; Halsey continued, unnoticing, uncaring. _"Your orders were a pretext to bring you to me and have been overridden. You are here, Team Noble, to assure the delivery of this vital data to a secure location."_

"It sounded like somebody needed to blow up this base," Emile muttered, "or was that 'pretext' too?"

Carter shot a warning glance at the warrant officer –Emile was already on thin ice with his commander, Jennifer reflected, for his attitude back in Sword Base proper –but Emile lifted his hands in surrender. Halsey shrugged_. "Others will handle the demolition,"_ she replied and Jennifer knew that was the end of the conversation as far as she was concerned. The surviving female Spartan of Noble Team turned away to look through one of the tram's tinted windows at the cave rushing around them as they moved forward.

But Carter still wasn't having it. "I'll need to confirm this new directive with command—"

"_Colonel Holland will be briefed. You belong to ONI now."_

The connection snapped off, as sharp and smart as its owner. Jennifer could imagine Dr. Halsey's dismissive turn away from the console and return to her work, always in some lab or some conference room or someplace made unreachable by the divide between military and intelligence slamming hard down between them. But it had never been so simple: the Spartan project had given them some common ground. And then the world had changed altogether with winter contingency…

There was a moment of silence after Halsey checked off the tram's channel and then Emile said flatly, "Like hell we belong to ONI."

Jun was quick to reply. "Holland is our Actual. It's always been that way. He knows us. We're his people. If they didn't inform him beforehand…"

"He's going to be so pissed," Emile finished, sounding half annoyed, half hopeful.

"Commander?"

Carter turned away from the center view screen and looked to Noble Team's dedicated sniper. "I don't like it either," he said grimly, "but this train is only going one way and it's going the direction Halsey wants. By the time we get off and get our bearings, she'll have probably already brought the storm down on the colonel's head. Probably working at it as we speak. After that, who knows what the circumstances will be?"

"And as circumstances are…?" Jennifer prompted.

He finally shouldered his DMR and took a seat on the closest line of chairs soldered against the tram's interior. There was a click and a soft hiss of compacted air as he unlocked and pulled his helmet free. Smiling a rare, crooked smile at her, all resignation and seeming unconcern to this reassignment, he replied, "We sit tight and see if circumstances change." His face darkened with his next words. "And try and get through this mission in one piece for a change."

Emile and Jun were quiet at that last sentiment, no doubt thinking on their fallen teammates as they turned away to the other side of the tram. Jennifer wondered if it would ever get old. Unlikely, given the lingering memory of Thom even before the winter contingency had been called: the first one of them to go, gone even before the new, the replacement, Noble Six had gotten there. And she sometimes thought that part of that Noble Six had fallen back to Reach with Jorge rather than with Jennifer.

Seeing Carter's face made her uneasy. It reminded her too much of how Jorge had pulled off his own helmet that long night on the supercarrier, when he had finally been certain of his fate. Even the faint resigned smile brooked too close a comparison for comfort. "Put your helmet back on," she asked without asking and the words felt foreign and numb in her mouth.

He raised his eyebrows at her and she swallowed, trying to gulp down her disquiet. The numbness buzzed on. "You're making me nervous," she tried again, closer to the right feeling that she could not quite reach, could not quite identify. It was closer to the truth that she could neither find nor articulate; he had always made her nervous.

Carter looked skeptical, or maybe concerned, but he let it go, acquiesced, and slid his helmet back over his features. There had been a time when she might have thought less of him for doing so, thought him less of a leader for complying with the request of the newest member of his team. Now, she thought more.

_Like it makes a difference_, a voice in the back of her mind, a voice from the crypt, from the supercarrier crackling through an explosion in zero-gravity, whispered to her real-time counterpart. _Wearing her helmet didn't save Kat. Hats on, hats off, might as well just be a hat where dying is concerned…_ Unrequested, she remembered a woman walking alone by the side of a road lined with strawberry fields left to rot. _She said you would know before the end._

_Cool story, _Jennifer shot back silently. _She also said I would have no regrets._

_Only if I did everything right._

One cave opened up onto another on the display Jun was studying, tracking their progress. "Last train to nowhere," the sniper muttered just before the tram slowed to a halt.

"I think you hurt its feelings," Emilie remarked as the doors slid smartly open.

There was only one place to go, they all saw when they stepped outside the tram: the elevator waiting their arrival, doors open and interface blinking in welcome. There was something unsettling about the passageway between tram and elevator; it was a cave and yet it was something else: something too uniform and perfect, something too smooth without any visible means of erosion. It had not been a glacier that had created this complex yet something told her that it had not been ONI either…

She ruled that it didn't matter as they all filed into the compartment one after another, silently resigned once again to the direction Dr. Halsey had been guiding them in all along. ONI was the master of repurposing, and where something –or someone –had come from didn't matter so much as where it was –or they were –going.

Wherever they were going, the elevator wasn't waiting on their initiative to take them there. The glorified metal box lurched to life of its own accord just as the tram had, interface blinking movement even before Jun's fingertips made contact with the display. "Dr. Halsey," said Carter, patching back into the frequency hopping channel she had initially contacted on, "where exactly are you taking us?"

She was listening. _"Before you is an alien artifact neither human nor Covenant in origin," _Halsey announced as the elevator sank downward, traveling through a cave glittering with ice. The air filtered through Jennifer's helmet was slightly stuffy, but just one glance out into the underground world beyond the windows was enough to send a shiver down her spine. It was a cave… and yet there was design to it. Purpose. Integrity. As though whoever had built it had had the foresight to build something that would outlast petty conflict, even attempted genocide on a galaxy-wide scale. She wondered what the aliens who had built this place would think about current events.

"Looks like a cave to…" Emilie began to remark dryly on a local channel and then stopped and Jennifer knew that the warrant officer saw what she saw.

"If you don't mind my asking," Jun said to an incorporeal Halsey, "who did build it then, ma'am?"

"_Whoever they were," _she replied and Jennifer thought she heard something irritated in the good doctor's voice at having to admit that she did not in fact know everything, _"what they built was advanced beyond our comprehension… until now. Thanks to your Noble Two in good measure, the decryption of its data is nearly complete."_

"Kat didn't say much of anything about it," Jun murmured on the local channel.

"Can you blame her for keeping her mouth shut?" Emile replied wryly. "Last time she tried to help out, Dr. Halsey threatened to have her spend a night in the brig."

Carter's attention was on other matters: namely, the cave beginning to collapse around them. The sound of stone crumbling, loud enough to be heard through the elevator walls, drew Jennifer's eyes to it as well: the builders, whoever they were, clearly had not anticipated an extended demolition operation to take place directly above their complex.

"Whatever we're doing down here," Emile said, "we better do it quick."

"Have your data ready, ma'am," said Carter as the elevator began to slow and the ground came up to meet them. Jennifer noted that it did not look particularly stable, trembling with explosions as it was. "We're coming to you."

"_The decryption is still underway. I need more time."_

Jun sighed. Emile cursed. Jennifer was still deciding whether or not she trusted the ground as the elevator hit the bottom floor. "I don't think you understand," Carter was saying into his comm. "We're _out_ of time. If we can't take it with us when we reach you, it's going to get buried."

"_I don't think _you _understand, commander," _Halsey shot back. Her voice sounded a little breathless, a lot different from her usual calm, collected, and somewhat scathing attitude, and Jennifer thought she sounded a little desperate too, on her own out there. _"Bury any of it and you bury mankind's best and last chance for survival! Commander, you've been wondering what your Spartans died for. Here is your answer, if you have the strength to face it. Please: buy me all the time you can."_

The elevator opened. Carter was the first out the door. "Let's find Halsey's lab," he said with a quiet determination that pushed past the interior grief he must have felt at the scientist's words –that they all must have felt. "Emile, take point. Move."

_Still not funny, _Jennifer thought darkly as the warrant officer sidled ahead to do so, lithe and soundless as a cat, one of those large ones so rarely seen in the wild, nothing cute about him. Emile wasn't the only thing hanging about that there was nothing cute about; was somebody forgetting who they were, who they all were? This was no time for sentimentality, not with the cavern collapsing around them…

Cool air rushed through her helmet's vents and she thought she could taste the chill of the ice with each breath she took. That was the first thing that had surprised her post-enhancement: how easy it was to breathe while doing… anything. For a brief example: chasing after Emile and Jun as they raced through a cavern complex threatening to collapse on top of their heads. Carter was somewhere behind her, but she refused to look, demanded to prove that at least one of them could keep their heads. One of them had to.

"Commander, I'm seeing turrets already assembled in defensive positions," Jun forewarned them even as they passed one by.

"Was ONI expecting company?" Emile muttered, slapping his palm against one of the aforementioned turrets as he passed it by. Jennifer hesitated beside it for a moment, but then decided that activating the machine now might attract more attention than they were currently prepared for. Besides, maybe Halsey was ready for them already…

"Over there!" Jun said, pointing at a place beyond the platforms that had been erected presumably for excavation of the massive cylindrical structure that dominated the cave complex.

Jennifer's eyes followed where he pointed and were delighted to espy a heavily stocked weapons' rack: DMRs racked up like prizes at a fair, grenades with their safety pins piled like oranges in a barrel. Carter was less impressed, although no doubt as relieved to replenish ammo. "The door is over there," he grumbled even as he packed a few extra rounds into his belt.

"Don't worry," she reassured him with a wan grin he couldn't see. "If the good doctor asks, we'll just say we couldn't be sure until we examined it more thoroughly."

"They were definitely expecting company," Emile confirmed, "and I don't think it's just our welcome back present."

The rumble of engines sounded overhead and Jennifer could pick up the smell of plasma residue despite her helmet's filters. She looked up just in time to see the Banshees begin their descent like strange birds of prey and had never before felt such kinship with a field mouse. Carter laughed darkly. "Definitely not, unless this is their idea of one."

"Wouldn't put it past them," Jun muttered, the scope of his sniper rifle lifted and aimed at the Covenant drop ships' engines. He was not firing… not yet.

Routing back into Halsey's channel, Carter informed her, "Doctor, we have hostiles inbound."

Halsey's reaction was late, but nonetheless anxious. _"Commander, you cannot allow them to break into my lab!"_

_At what cost? _Jennifer wondered and measured Carter's minute delay before responding as a similar passage of thought. He sounded a thousand years older when he answered, as though his face beneath the helmet was a thousand times more lined. She knew that the corners of his eyes and mouth had indeed weathered since Visegrad. No doubt hers had as well, making her look an age she would probably never attain. "Understood," he said to Halsey and then clicked off the channel input. To his fellow Spartans, he said, "Let's give them hell."

"Might be a good idea to get those turrets up and running," Jun suggested.

"Agreed." Carter took one look at the circling Banshees –they had yet to pinpoint their presence, but that would all change once they moved out into the open to activate those turrets –and said, "Jun, with me."

"I'm faster."

The words were out fast, as fast as she was when she had a target and open ground between them and once the words were out she could not deny them. She met Carter's gaze in the way only Spartans with two sheets of glass and innumerable shared experiences could: half-certainty, half-guessing game, never quite sure of whether she wanted to throw a punch or kiss him hard. "I'm faster," she said again. "It should be me. You know it should be me."

"We don't have time for this," he told her flatly as the Banshees' roar grew louder and their engines closer. "That's not an opinion."

"No, it's not," she agreed when she spotted her own personal ace in the hole over his left shoulder. "It's a fact." And before he could respond, before he could recognize her goal even with Spartan quality awareness, she was gone.

A twist of the ignition was all that was needed to breathe life into the mongoose's engines. The soles of her boots pressed firmly against the footpads, Jennifer hit the gas and took off. The glorified motorbike felt _good _under her hands; she resisted the urge to purr along with the engine. She had forgotten how it felt to be on her own with no one's rules but hers governing her movements, unlike her Spartan training-filled adolescence which had been scripted to the letter. She had forgotten how good it felt to play the lone wolf.

For a moment, she could forget: forget Halsey, forget Kat, forget Holland, forget Noble Team, forget Carter. They had tried forgetting together, the commander and her, the night before, and it had worked for a time in the small eternity of a shared bunkroom, but it had fast and fleeting. The universe had come crashing back down on top of them, the weight of the dying summer crumpling their bodies. They had needed to put the armor back on, and so they had. But there were ways of forgetting with the armor on, and Jennifer was beginning to recall them to life.

At least until Jorge called her back.

_Get the turrets and get back to your team, _was the thought that flooded her conscious mind and she wasn't quite sure how it had arrived there. _Get the turrets and get back to your team_, was all she could think of as the grunts began to leap, chittering excitedly, from the Banshees that had brought them, and waddle toward the lab. Grunts were something she knew that any Spartan worth their salt could handle while half-asleep, but she also knew that grunts would not be the end of it. _Get the turrets and get back to your team._

She kicked down on the brakes and let the engine stall when she came up alongside the first turret. In the distance, she could see one Banshee, wandering too close to the lab, spiral out of control. The sound of a high velocity sniper shot shadowed the sight like the thunder after the lightning and she knew that the explosive crash against the side of the alien complex that followed was Jun's doing. With no small amount of regret, she noted that that trick could not be easily used again, that the other drop ships would now maintain a perimeter that would keep their easily combustible engines out of harm's way. _Should've played that card when we really needed it, not now, not so soon; I could've played it better._

_You don't know, _said another voice, a rougher, kinder, and yet stern all the same voice. _You don't know what was going on over there. For all you could tell, while you were revving up your lone wolf engine, the Covvies were planning to play at kamikaze and that was the only way. You don't know what was better._

It had done something though, she realized as she brought up the turret's interface and highlighted the activation protocols. Now the Covenant could be depended upon to drop its people at a distance, rather than keep up close and personal with the lab's entrance. There would be no bombing from above; it would be a firefight, a proper firefight… if the Covenant's ground forces would be able to pick their way unscathed through the ring of fire between the drop zone and the lab Jennifer was activating.

"_They're landing out of range!"_ Emile's voice cracked over the comm. _"There! Across the bridge."_

"_Hold to this position," _Carter ordered. He paused briefly, then added, almost begrudgingly, _"If you're going to set up a perimeter, Six, get it done."_

"_I need more time," _Halsey chimed in. _"Whatever you're going to do, do it!"_

So many voices; they made you obey and obey even when –especially when –you had just blatantly disregarded their commands. The first turret hummed to life, its mechanical head swiveling in search of prey. Jennifer slammed down the interface panel and soldered it shut with an excavation tool she had found lying about the dig site. Better the turret burn out than the Covenant turn their own weapons against them. Wasn't that the whole point of a torch and burn op?

One down, three to go. She swung her left leg over the mongoose's seat and took off. Jackals were falling from the sky –or rather the cave ceiling –now, feathers puffing out like strange birds of prey, but there was no time to deal with them, even as they dropped directly into her path. Besides, the sound of automated gunfire behind her meant that the turret was picking up the slack.

"_Ten," _said Jun over the comm, sounding like he was out of breath. Impossible for a Spartan.

"_Twelve," _Emile countered and she could detect his smug grin in his voice.

"_Still more," _said Carter tersely between shots of his own rifle. _"Get to it."_

Programming the second turret went by as smoothly as the first and the comm chatter did nothing to indicate that the action at the lab's entrance was anything different. _Maybe the Covenant is getting tired, _she thought as she jetted the mongoose through a miniature canyon that conjured up memories of a larger counterpart, of that massive gorge she and Kat had forded the day the Grafton went down, and those screams, all of those screams… _We're getting plenty tired. I wish I could sleep. I wish I could sleep and dream and not wake up until the apocalypse is over and done with and there is nothing I can do. Doing something, anything, when the sky is falling down around us is exhausting, even for Spartans. That turret won't last forever; how long until _we _burn out?_

Yet here was Dr. Halsey promising them a second wind, it seemed like. Another chance to turn and face the sea of troubles and, maybe this time, end them.

_Maybe this time, we'll be on the winning side again._

Unexpected weight suddenly jerked the balance of the mongoose backward. _Uninvited passenger, _Jennifer thought but before she could turn her neck around to check, long-fingered hands wrapped around her throat. Talons dug into the interlocking mesh between shoulders and helmet and it was all she could do to keep the mongoose steady, from veering off and sending them both into a tailspin neither of them would survive. Not that there were many other options as her throat constricted.

Nonetheless, she chose the first option that presented itself to her. She slammed down hard on the brakes and let the momentum of the sudden stop toss both her and the jackal –she assumed it was a jackal later; in present time it was simply the thing that _would not get the hell off of her back_ –off of the mongoose and onto the ground. The topple winded them both… but Jennifer's breath was already constrained as it was; it made little difference to her. They hit the ground sideways and Jennifer threw her weight to the right, rolling; in her armor, she was heavier and she could take control. Pinned beneath her back, the jackal squawked… but did not release his claws, which was what she had been hoping for.

They rolled again, gravel crunching beneath her armor, but she could not shake the thing. Blindly, as her visor's interior screen lit up warnings, she scrambled forward, the jackal still clinging to her back and throat like some animal's cub. Where was Jun to shoot the creature in the neck? Where was Emile to stab it in the back? Where was Carter to pry it off of her altogether?

_Back at the lab entrance. Where you left them, Lone Wolf._

Groaning exasperation with her own hasty foolishness, she pulled the knife from her belt and pressed the edge of the blade against the jackal's fingers coiled at her throat. The metal wouldn't slice through her armor… but it would the alien's fingers.

She didn't like it; she didn't like it even as her vision blurred and she began sawing the blade back and forth. She didn't like the sticky blood on her hands; she didn't like hearing the creature howl, even when it finally released her. _What's the point_, she asked herself, _to all this sudden empathy? It was trying to kill you. You're going to kill it. _

_Clean death, _she answered, insisting. _We're not the monsters. That's their job._

Or so she told herself when she finally rolled off of the jackal, stood up, and planted a bullet in its writhing body.

One look at her mongoose told her it was little more than scrap. Braking hard had been enough to throw its two passengers onto the ground; not enough to stop it from careening into a slab of ice. Thankfully, they had landed –she had landed –less than five yards from the third turret.

_Any moment now, this place will be crawling with Covenant,_ she thought as she popped open the access panel with the stained blade of her knife, _and you're clearly out of practice when it comes to being on your own_. She couldn't make up her mind rather that was a good thing or a bad one. _Being part of a team didn't save Thom. It didn't save Jorge, didn't save Kat. In the end, it's you, one and one with whether you're going to let them kill you or not. There isn't anyone to pull the elite off of your back, _she added, thinking of when Carter had saved her life back at Visegrad.

The third turret swiveled into operation and she could just barely set her sights on the fourth when the crash of mortar reverberated throughout the ice-coated complex. Her attention was immediately called to the Phantoms hovering amongst the Banshees, pouring fire down upon the base's exterior. _"Mortar rounds!" _she heard Emile shout over the comm a moment after her recognition. _"Take cover!"_

"_Watch the brute!" _Jun added and hopefully they were all heeding his advice. _"Shit, there's two of them."_

"_You alright in there, doctor?"_

"_Hold on, Spartans," _Halsey answered Noble Team's commander. _"I'm getting close." _

Jennifer looked to the fourth turret, the last turret, in the near distance. It was close too, really, really closer, closer than the base entrance. Losing the mongoose would set her back some, cost her time getting there and then getting back, and plasma was falling from the sky along with Covenant troops, but they had not called her back, had not asked for her…

_Get back to your team._

_Message received, _thought Jennifer sourly, _loud and clear. If you're a ghost, you're a very practical one._

She didn't really think that it was the ghost of Jorge haunting her; she wasn't that crazy, not yet. But, if she was feeling stupidly sentimental enough to pull from a sympathy card, she could acknowledge that she might have been attempting, subconsciously, to pull a piece of the older Spartan along with them in her.

As Carter no doubt did with Kat, she thought begrudgingly, and they all had seemed to with Thom.

_Get back to your team._

_Going,_ she thought, irritated now as her legs moved mechanically under her in long strides that became bounds, crossing unfamiliar territory as she took the most direct path back to the lab entrance. If she moved fast enough, she figured, she could make up lost time and outrun the mortar onslaught besides. And besides: she had always loved to run.

Twenty feet from the barricade, plasma exploded to her right. The iridescent blue gel scorched the legs of her armor, burning scars against the red paint, but that wasn't the problem. The problem was the blast that threw her off of her feet for the second time that day: something she was quickly becoming very sick of. Palms slapping the ground, she sputtered out her indignation and then staggered back to her feet. At least nothing was trying to climb on top of her this time…

"Soldier-girl, catch!" she heard Emile shout and she felt her hands reach out by reflex. A shotgun fell into them, which could only mean a select few things. The roar and thudding footsteps behind her narrowed the choices down considerably. She hooked her finger into the trigger mechanism, pivoted on the balls of her feet, and shot the brute between the eyes.

Attempting to reload by reflex, she sprinted forward and realized she was at a loss for ammo along the way. Uneasy about having her back to the enemy but knowing that time was of the essence when it came to the plasma rounds being dropped on their heads, she had just cleared the barricade when a hand reached out, wrapped around her wrist, and Carter pulled her down beside him on the other side.

"Everyone wants to get me on the ground today," she complained and he threw an ammo pack at her.

"Can you blame them?" he replied with misplaced humor before he threw himself around the barricade's corner and fired off a few more rounds. "Still not happy about you running off on your own solo mission," he griped when he resurfaced to reload.

Jennifer shot up and notched her DMR over the barricade's upper edge, zooming in and firing off three precise shots. A Covenant ranger jerked suddenly at shoulder, torso, and then neck before dropping to the ground. "Can you blame me?" she shot back. "How many more chances am I gonna have for a joyride through enemy lines?"

"If you two are done," Emile cut in, "there are some heads in need of rolling over here."

"Ghosts!" Jun called out in warning.

"Get the engines!" Carter responded and then shot off a few more rounds to make good on his suggestion. When he came back for air, he muttered, "Everything but the kitchen sink, much?"

"I don't think the Covenant _have_ kitchen sinks to throw at us," Jennifer said but the tail end of her comment was abruptly cut off as a large explosion wracked the other side of the barrier followed by a heavy crash that rattled both structure and Spartan. Smoke drifted through the air around them, and the heat readings when her fingertips touched the barricade were high and rising. She peered around the corner to see the scattered remnants of purple machinery and plasma.

"Sorry," Emile drawled from the other barricade to her right. "My bad."

Carter shook his head. "Can't keep this up forever," he muttered.

"_Package is almost ready," _Halsey insisted. If she hadn't heard him, Jennifer reflected, she had bloody good timing. _"Just a little more…"_

It was always just a little more, Jennifer thought as she threw herself around the corner and pumped a ranger full of bullets. Always, always, always just a little more, ever since Visegrad, since the Grafton, since the Long Night of Solace, since New Alexandria. A lot of a little more just ended up being a lot; when was it going to be enough?

_Not today, _she decided grimly and set back into work.

* * *

><p><em>Not sure how many of you are still about. I do intend to finish this story; I was going to get all the way to Halsey in this chapter, but the word count got too high. There may well be another update soon. To those still reading, thank you so much for your continued support.<em>


	31. Burial at Sea

**Thirty-one: Burial at Sea **

August 29th, 2552

"I think we're pretty lucky that the Covenant doesn't have a kitchen sink, commander," Emile was calling over the comm as another round of mortar slammed into the barricades and walls surrounding Halsey's lab, "because if they did, I'm pretty damn sure it would have smacked me in the skull by now."

"Smacked _us _in the skull," Jun corrected, slamming another round into his sniper rifle. He notched the rifle over the barricade's edge, peered through the scope and fired. "Collective, Emile," he continued just after ducking down beneath an answering chorus of plasma fire. "We're a team, remember? What hits one of us, hits us all."

Carter laughed, although it was a stretch to call the harsh gasp of air that came over his comm that. Jennifer didn't think it was that funny, and she glanced over at him, eyes narrowed beneath the helmet, suspecting Noble Leader of humoring their fellow teammates. What hits one of them, hits them all; she supposed they should be counting their blessings that they all hadn't taken plasma needles to the eye.

"Watch out! They're making another delivery!"

If she closed her eyes, she could drown out the screech of the approaching Phantom's engines with the white noise of memory. Go back to the start for just an instant; look back from a dark present on a moment where the future had seemed so bright. Hitting the ground at Visegrad, the smell of damp grass, the truck set on fire by presumed Insurrectionists when they had had the luxury to presume that they could be just tracking humans, hunting lesser monsters, the minor skirmishes with Noble Leader, all of that felt like paradise now. And she wanted to go back and never see the jackal perched up on that roof.

_Someone would have seen it. If not you, then Kat or Emile or any of them. Someone, somewhere on Reach, would have seen it and you would have been called to action. All roads lead to the same destination. At least you know that Noble has a reputation to get things done right. Somebody else might've screwed it up._

"Hunters!" Jun added and Jennifer looked down at the weapon in her hands and sighed. She had the shotgun; it had to be her. Somebody else might screw it up.

Carter looked and he saw too. "Go around," he said. "I'll cover."

She resisted, daring him to treat her as he had for the entire mission so far, like her bones had turned from steel to porcelain in the night. "There're two of them." _It's always two_, Kat had said when they first had encountered this particular massive brand of the Covenant's ground troops. Jennifer remembered.

His voice, when he spoke, was as level as ever. "One at a time, Spartan. Go."

So she went. The hunters' steps shook the ground but all she could think of as the platforms trembled beneath her boots was the sound of Carter's heartbeat beneath her ear as she rested her head on his chest the night before. She had not meant to stay through the night yet that was where she had woken up the following morning.

The memory of a heartbeat turned to the rhythm of a ticking clock thudding in her ears as she dodged from one barricade to another, drowning out the staccato of Carter's covering fire until all that was left was the fear that they would all run out eventually, that it wouldn't just be time that would fail them as the planet burned but their bodies as well, the fear that even Spartan augments might not be good enough to save Reach after all.

_I can shake the ground too._ She inched around the corner of the farthest barricade, sidestepping Jun and ducking beneath the shot he was in the process of taking on an elite that was keeping its distance, the style of and insignia on his armor unreadable at this point although Jun could no doubt make it out through his scope. Odd that he hadn't called the target out by now, but there were bigger fish to fry.

Another round of mortar hit the ground so she hit the ground too, slamming down flat on her ass and sliding less-than-gracefully out of the line of fire. Her momentum carried her forward, tumbling down the slope in a haphazard roll, but one that drew no attention from her target. Crouched close against the ice, she inched her way forward, shotgun in hand, toward the closer hunter's exposed flank. One shot won't be enough, she remembered from last time she had visited Sword Base and her gaze darted down briefly to double-check that she had the recommended number of rounds locked and loaded.

The hunter had all of its attention on Carter, as he had planned. Green fire crackled out of the assault cannon soldered to its dominant limb, searing the barricade Noble Leader was quick to dart behind before throwing himself back out there in a relentless assault. _Don't be stupid, Carter. You stay out too long, that shield can crush you as easily as this cave will crush all of us and Halsey if we don't get our shit together._

That shield was hiding the same thing as their Spartan armor: vulnerable, messy, organic bits. But, also like them, the hunter had long since learned to use it not to its advantage, but to its necessity. That left one place and one place only, so Jennifer charged.

She wasn't afraid, no, not as her feet pounded the space in between her and the monster, not when she had always gotten along alright with the much, much scarier monster under her own bed, the one she had never brought out for company. At least not until she had begun to realize… Realize what; that maybe last night the monster had had company on the flip side of Carter's bunk, hiding beneath the trailing sheets?

Trying the trick that had worked the first time, that first day at Sword Base, ignoring the feeling of history repeating, telling herself it was just muscle memory and nothing more, she came to a quick standstill directly behind the creature. A hairsbreadth from its back, she crouched close enough that it would have been able to feel her breath on its spine… if she had breath to spare. The helmet's ventilation made sure every sharp exhale, every sigh, every gasp was recycled. Once, she had wondered if that was somehow the problem, that emotions were never being released into the atmosphere where they belonged, out there in an endless imperceptible sea of angst. That was before, when she had time to wonder.

Now was not the time for that. Now was the time to be stepping this way, turning that, ducking the assault rifle fire that was now as much a risk to her as the hunter –"Carter, it's fine. Carter, I've got it." –notching the shotgun's firing mechanism… and letting it go, light as a feather, smooth as glass.

Shrapnel tore at the hunter's exposed neck, digging through flesh and… God knows what else, Jennifer thought with distant distaste as wiggling finger-like appendages thrashed in agony, just visible through the open wound. The hunter howled a half-moment spent registering its pain later: predictable. Its companion, blood-brother, whatever, howled an echo barely briefer and less pained than its counterpart: also predictable. What wasn't predictable was the rush of pressure that coursed through Jennifer's skeleton at the sound… or at least that's what it felt like: tightening, aching, roaring through her bones like the ghostly memory of her augmentation. She didn't understand; she had heard it before and it had been a sweet sound, the confirmation that this would not be her grave.

It was a moment's delay before she realized that this was the first time she had faced hunters since Noble Team's numbers had been struck down by two. Before she realized just how the other hunter felt when its companion collapsed against the icy ground, shuddering and moaning, waiting for the death blow. A death blow Jennifer suddenly could not bring herself to deliver.

_I'm going to lose them, _she realized even as Carter reminded her, "Finish it," half-disbelieving at her delay. Her finger stalled on the trigger, stunned that he didn't see it like she did, hadn't heard it like she had, was totally oblivious to the vision playing and replaying over and over again in her head. _Now or later. It's inevitable. We were born for this. We'll die for this. Jorge was buried at sea. I don't know where they took Kat. Where will our graves be?_

She heard gunfire, distant in her intangible isolation, and another thud as the other hunter toppled with a groan. No scream; maybe it figured that it wasn't worthwhile now that its companion had gone before it. _If a tree falls in a forest and nobody is around to hear it… _There had been no sound, not at all, when the supercarrier had exploded. Running across the courtyard, the sound had come so fast that nobody heard it until after the needle was embedded in her visor in her skull. Kat hadn't had time to scream. Jorge had had seventy-six seconds and he had wasted most of it trying to reclaim Six's s humanity. Had he screamed or had he smiled when the repurposed slip-space drive had torn both him and the supercarrier to shreds? _He thought he was saving the planet._

_He was wrong. _

Doubt made for bitter company, but she could not seem to shake it. It was wrapped around her waist; its fingers laced a pattern across her forehead. It wasn't until Carter said again, "Finish it, Six," that she lifted her shotgun once again and unloaded its contents into the still twitching hunter's body.

The air was quiet for what felt like the first time in a small eternity. She watched the hunter fade into its grave, small spasms diffusing into stillness as she realized what had brought her back, what had made her look, really look again, and pull the trigger and be done with it. Six hadn't failed her; far from it. Six had brought her back. _Are you surprised? It worked well, really well, for a long time. Was I going to cut out my heart because it skipped a beat?_

Carter cast one more look out at the ice chamber. The Phantoms had dispersed, at least for the time being, and all that remained of the Covenant's siege were the scorch marks and bodies scattered across the frosted ground. There appeared to be a window of stillness at hand, if they had the sense to claim and take advantage of it.

"_Well done, Spartans," _said Halsey over the channel. Her words bleared in her ear, and Jennifer resisted the urge to take her helmet off. She couldn't do that; it might make him as nervous as he made her. Now wasn't the time to be making anyone anything. Over Carter's left shoulder, she saw the console near the installation's door light up. _"I am opening the laboratory door."_

She was as good as her word. The locking mechanisms clicked open, the magnetic seals hissed their deactivation, and the military-grade door levered upward, offering entry. Emile was the first one through, disappearing into the blackness of the corridor beyond. Jun shortly followed, but Jennifer stalled. The darkness intimidated her, on an allegorical level more than anything else, she reflected with disgust. Night vision existed for a reason. But she looked into the blackness and all she could think of were Marie's parting words before their augmentations, before the augmentation that had cost the other girl her life: _"You can't go home again."_

"Jen," said Carter firmly, but not unkindly, and she turned away and walked willingly past him into the darkness. She didn't need to be told twice.

Door slamming shut behind them, they took off down the corridor without deliberation: only one way to go. Jogging to catch up to Jun and Emile, Jennifer kept stealing side-glances at her commander, wondering. It's when they entered the tunnel, circular in design, glistening everywhere with iridescent ice, that her curiosity got the better of her. _This is a place for a first kiss, _she thought idly as her steps stalled before remembering the previous night. Crimson flooded to her face, the blush hidden by her armor of the same hue, but what she asked Carter instead, careful to keep it off the comm channel, was: "What do you do when you think you're losing?"

He stopped in his tracks, as she might have guessed he would. "That's my line," he said, half-accusing, half-despondent.

"I know."

"Now isn't the time," he said but he didn't turn or move away.

"When will it be the time?" she asked and he didn't answer. She took a step forward. "There's never going to be time, Carter. Not for this. Not for us."

"Well, that's not fair," Carter replied and then he did turn away and resume jogging down the tunnel. The ice reflected off of his blue armor, and Jennifer just stood, watched the light show for a moment, and wondered whether he was talking about her timing or just the unfairness of life in general.

One tunnel opened up onto another and Carter was moving fast. For a brief moment, she thought she might lose him down there; for an even briefer moment, she wanted to lose him. Better lose sight, lose track of him now rather than draw out the inevitable and the last visual of his departing back was still better than the expected alternative… but she caught up. It was pretty easy to do so, considering that Noble Team's commander had stopped to stare at the same thing Emile and Jun were. And now Jennifer too.

She had been inside labs before; hell, she had been inside _Dr. Halsey's _labs before. But Jennifer wasn't sure how this massive chamber with the enormous structure at its heart with the huge glowing blue light at _its _heart qualified for the mundane description of "lab." She glanced to one side of the platform leading up to the scaffolding surrounding its base and saw blue currents flowing and wavering toward the light, turning what appeared to be nothing into _something _blue and dazzling and clearly powerful. God, her mother would have gone mad for it. She made herself blink a few times and then shake her head, reminding herself that that was not the point.

"What is this stuff?" Jun asked, clearly not feeling bound by neither reverence nor whatever that feeling Jennifer was experiencing that made her want to shove everything to one side and go to her happy place. Wherever that was, because she didn't have a clue.

Jennifer thought Halsey would take offense at the term "stuff," would bristle and retort, but the good doctor didn't bat an eye. In fact, she was too busy doing… whatever she was doing to even turn around and get a visual on them. Nevertheless, she answered Jun's question, although Six wondered if she even knew his name.

"Knowledge," she said briefly, pacing back and forth from one console to the other in winter thermals whose bulk on her petite frame vaguely mimicked that of Spartan armor. Halsey was shorter than Jennifer remembered, as though the weight of Reach was pressing down on her shoulders, crushing closer to the ground. She wondered if they all were shrinking. "A birthright from an ancient civilization," the doctor continued. "This AI is its custodian… and she has chosen you as her carriers."

It sounded sketchy and Jennifer wasn't the only one who thought so. "Chosen," Emile repeated skeptically, tilting his helmeted head in Carter's direction like a teenage recruit sharing secrets barely out of earshot of the drill instructor, "by an AI?"

"By _this _AI, yes," Halsey cut in, lip curling as she glanced over one shoulder at them. "She has a name, and a capacity far greater than your standard Dot. Her measure of you carries as much weight as my own." She paused. "Perhaps more."

_Clearly more, _Six thought, _since you don't seem to think much of us at all. For a Creator, you're not exactly noticeably proud of your protégés._

Halsey was not a mind reader; Six couldn't fault the doctor for talking over her interior thoughts, but she felt annoyed all the same. "You will take her to the UNSC ship-breaking yards in Aszod," she continued, her instructions simultaneous with her operation of the massive holographic interface she was facing… consequently keeping her back to them. "There will be a _Halcyon_-class cruiser waiting to take her off-planet."

"Understood," replied Carter. Jennifer wondered if he really did, or if the words were just reflex at this point. In this facility especially, with the blue light of the alien device reflected on all of their visors and the white of Halsey's jacket, there were clearly so many things that they did not understand.

The doctor's hands stilled over the interface. Leaning slightly to one side, Jennifer saw a spherical projection with… a woman inside? Curious, she lifted her fingers and waved: a minute waggle of her gloved fingers. The projection did not wave back. Sidling back into her neutral stance, Jennifer felt a scowl cross her face. Seems the AI was just as stuck-up as her creator. She heard Emile snort. Jun was too busy scoping the lab to notice… and Carter had other things monopolizing his attention.

"Do you?" Halsey was asking him and from the tone of her voice, it was clear she did not want to be interrupted with an answer. "Mankind, if you haven't noticed, is outmatched, commander. When Reach falls –and it will fall –our annihilation is all but certain."

_There's the answer to your question, Jen, _she thought and then her eyes darted to Carter beside her. _Both of our questions. New one: what do you do when you _know _you're losing?_

Halsey's hand stalled on the projected interface again. "Unless," she began and Jennifer thought she saw the doctor's neck twitch a fraction of an inch toward the holographic woman in her bubble, "unless we can glean something of use from this artifact. Something on the level of the conical bullet in the 19th century… or FTL travel in the twenty-third."

"And if we can't?" Carter asked and Jennifer thought that was unlikely. _"I am an eternal optimist," _he had said to her once. _"Eternally happy, aren't I?"_

"Good question," Emile muttered as Halsey answered, suddenly sharp, "An apt question, commander, if there were somewhere else to place our hopes. There is not."

She paused again, scanned the monitors one more time, and, with a flick of her index finger, shut off the projections and the interface. The lab went dark, save for the work lights… and the omnipresent blue light. Jennifer yawned –she wished she had the luxury to sleep –as the doctor retrieved a data storage device bigger, much bigger, than the one that Jennifer had downloaded the contents of the supercarrier computer onto and took a few steps toward the assembled members of Noble Team. Jennifer was wondering if there was time to dig into the field rations they had brought –obviously not, with Reach falling and all –when suddenly the storage unit was directly in front of her, pinched between Dr. Halsey's two hands like an offering. That couldn't be it; they didn't offer, they ordered.

"Take it, lieutenant," Halsey said. She had walked past Jun, walked past Emile, and walked past Carter, who was now standing between them and off to one side, watching. "She has made her choice."

Carter cleared his throat. "Noble Six is to escort you to Castle Base, Dr. Halsey."

Both Jennifer and Halsey's heads snapped in his direction. "Pardon?" said the doctor, the device still suspended between her hands, not yet accepted. "I require no escort, commander."

"You do, ma'am," he corrected and failed to add the _with all due respect _disclaimer… or chose not to. "Somebody needs to make sure that _nothing _falls into enemy hands."

"She has made her choice," Halsey said again and she didn't even sound scathing this time, "as have I. It isn't your jurisdiction to make it for either of us, commander." Halsey looked to Jennifer again. "Or for Noble Six."

_So it is my choice. _It _was _an offering, not a mandate. First time for everything.

She looked down at the data storage unit. It had a blue light at its core, just like the larger one casting shadows all around them. It thrummed; she could feel its pulse even at this distance, like a minor heartbeat. _It's my choice,_ she thought again and extended her arms, reaching out and closing her hands around the unit so that the smaller blue light trickled out between her gloved fingertips. _Wouldn't be the first time I've disobeyed Carter, but it might be the last. And it's my choice._

"Do you have it?" Halsey asked quietly, gently.

Jennifer blinked; she thought it was obvious. "Yeah."

"Say the words," said Halsey and then added, "please."

It was the please that got her. "I have it."

Slowly, Halsey let go of the unit and the weight fell completely into Jennifer's hands, increment by increment. When the doctor finally stepped back completely, she tested the leverage of the thing in her hand. It was at once heavier and lighter than she had expected. She didn't feel like she was holding mankind's salvation in her hands; what it felt like was a cumbersome and awkward data storage unit. But from Halsey's face, it might as well have been the weight of the world. If they couldn't save Reach –_and it will fall _–maybe they could save Earth.

She hadn't realized until then what a weight it had taken off of her shoulders, those four words: _it will fall. _Someone finally admitting it so she wouldn't have to, someone finally answering Kat's question of _I want to know if we've lost. _It was bittersweet to say the least, but still sweeter than she would have thought.

Carter turned and walked away. Emile followed shortly after. Jun lingered a few moments, looking at her, and Jennifer thought that his expression must be thoughtful behind the visor but she couldn't be sure, before leaving too. She wasn't worried. She knew that they wouldn't go far. There was a mission to do.

There were magnetic latches at the back of her armor, just below where she notched her rifles. She reached behind her with the data storage unit in one hand, brought the other around to activate the latches and secure it into place. It could have been smoother, asking for help, but somehow that didn't seem to fit the mood. It was hers. It was her choice. _I have it._

Halsey watched her and nodded with satisfaction when she was done. Her left hand skimmed a certain compartment as she brought it back around; inspiration struck. The next thing she knew, there were two small but significant items clutched in her palm.

She presented one to Halsey while still concealing the other. The doctor looked at the data file pinched between Jennifer's fingers, slightly perplexed. "It's the supercarrier's data files," she tried to explain. "What ONI wanted, when I went up. You're all that's left of ONI on Reach, aren't you?"

"Just about," she agreed grimly, "just as you three are just about all that's left of Noble Team. What am I supposed to do with files concerning an army that's already ravaged us, field plans that have already been executed?"

"I…" she stuttered. "I… don't know."

"No," she agreed again and then looked at Jennifer so intently that the Spartan thought that the doctor's blue-grey eyes might just be as blinding as the blue light. "No, you may need that. When Reach falls…"

"And it will fall," Jennifer finished, understanding.

Halsey nodded and then looked again, more curiously. "You're not one of mine," she said, almost a question, "are you?"

It took a moment for Jennifer to understand. "No," she finally said, shaking her head slightly. "No, I'm not. Neither is Emile or Jun or Carter or Kat. Just Jorge."

"Just Jorge," she repeated and then she too shook her head. "Then where did the rest of you come from? Don't answer that; I'll figure it out soon enough. What's that?"

It was Jorge's dogtags she was holding out to her now. "Ma'am," she started to say.

"I know that he's dead," Halsey cut her off abruptly. "I know exactly when, how, and probably why he died and sent you back down to Reach. What I don't know is why you seem to expect me to have anything to say to you save that you had better get that package to the_ Pillar of Autumn._"

Jennifer looked at her, so many things she wanted to say, so many things she wanted to ask all boiling and bubbling inside of her, oceans threatening to flood their continents over. But she didn't. She was right. There was no time. And some things had to be sacrificed.

"I don't know either, ma'am," is what she said instead, closed her fingers back over the dogtags, and walked away.

She found Carter by the hangar that Dr. Halsey followed her to. Jennifer wasn't aware that she had been leading; it seemed instead that she had just happened upon the right direction and started walking in it. Noble Leader was giving orders to individuals likelier to obey them. "Jun, I want you to escort Dr. Halsey to Castle. Somebody's got to. Remember: nothing in enemy hands."

"I'll do what's necessary, sir," replied Jun with a nod. He looked to Emile, then to Jennifer, including them both in his next sentiment: "Good luck."

"You too, sniper," said Carter.

Emile just nodded, not one for goodbyes. She wondered why he wasn't taking advantage; one goodbye couldn't be worse than the death they never saw coming. Nothing could have been worse than Kat. But she still had to make this better. Something compelled her to. "Hey, Jun?" she said suddenly. "I wanted to say thanks."

"What for?" he asked just as Emile said, "This should be good."

She felt a misplaced grin stretch across her face. "For telling me I didn't have to out-Emile Emile."

"Out-Emile me?" Emile snorted. "Impossible."

It was silly, but it broke the tension. Jun mock-saluted her, and she imagined that it made it easier for him to walk away. Which had been the point. And she was grateful.

"Flight check," Carter told Emile and that sent the warrant officer jogging toward the farther Pelican, the one Jun had not already claimed. And then there was silence. Alone, Jennifer realized, she and Carter didn't know what to do with each other. The data storage unit thrumming at her back felt very heavy. And she couldn't find the words to lighten the load.

But she tried anyway. "Look, I know what you were trying to do."

"Do you?" he asked curtly and she thought it must have been the echo of Halsey's earlier question to him, if he really did understand that Reach would fall. And of course he had, just was still planning the optimist card. Like he had been playing the protector one. Still was.

"Yeah," Jennifer countered, "same thing you've been doing since we hit the ground on the torch and burn. "I don't need babysitting jobs. I can take point. Nothing's changed. I still am exactly the same person I was yesterday."

"But you're not the same person you were a month ago, are you?" he retorted and then sighed. Jennifer thanked God they weren't feeding into a channel, especially when he said, more quietly, "Look, clearly I'm no good at this one night stand thing."

"And who says I am?" she demanded, flushing hotly now. "And who says that was what I wanted?"

She got the feeling he was about to respond when Emile's voice came over the channel. _"Everything checks out, commander. Time to hit the skies."_

Carter lifted a hand to his helmet. "Copy that, Four." To Jennifer, he sighed again and said, "I didn't…"

When he didn't finish, she shrugged and repeated his earlier words. "Well, that's not fair."

"No," he agreed quietly. "It's not." Carter shrugged back at her and together they walked to the waiting Pelican.

He took the pilot's seat before she could, already adjusting the monitors and the seat height to his proportions. Standing in the troop bay, Jennifer watched Jun and Halsey's Pelican clear the landing pad and take into the skies ahead of them as Carter said, "Dot, I need a heading."

"_At three kilometers north, turn right. Heading zero-five-zero."_

The engines roared to life. Emile perched on the edge of the bay, one leg dangling over the cusp. Jennifer's stomach rolled over at the sight alone; would she _ever _let go of the heights thing?

"Which leads to?"

"_The ship-breaking yard in Azsod_,_"_ was the brisk answer to Carter's second request. _"The only off-planet extraction point left on this continent. Small scale air attacks have decimated many convoys enroute. An armada of Covenant cruisers have arrived as well. UNSC cruiser, __Pillar of Autumn__ is waiting for your arrival."_

She felt her lungs give in a massive sigh of exasperation. It never ended. Carter glanced over one shoulder briefly. "Nobody said it would be simple," he told her.

"Well, did anybody say it would be this complicated?" she shot back.

"Nope," Emile answered promptly.

Jennifer sighed again. There was certainly a lot of that going around. Looking down through the open bay, she watched as the ocean opened up and swallowed what was left of Sword Base, dragging it all down beneath waves and ice. And glass too, eventually.

She had never been to Reach before her assignment to Noble Team. Now, she was fighting for the survival of a planet she had never set foot on, that she didn't really know. Looking over one shoulder, she wondered if Carter was thinking about Ohio. Wherever on Earth that was.

* * *

><p><em>AN: I did some reading that Halsey didn't know about the Spartan-IIIs until she realized that the members of Noble Team save Jorge weren't IIs, something she later confirms rifling through files at CASTLE base. I thought I would show a bit of that._

_Once again, thank you so much to all readers and especially those who have given me valued feedback. It really helps, honest. :)_


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